Miko Vergun has three words for all of this: “Solutions! Solutions! Solutions!” A Juliana plaintiff from Oregon, she says she doesn’t care whose fault it is. Or how we got here or why we stay the course. She only wants a fix.
She says this sitting on a couch in the visitor center at Tualatin Hills Nature Park outside Portland, her arms pulled into her sweatshirt and a fire in the fireplace in the tiny library there. Miko’s not a loud kid. We’ve just taken a walk with her mother, Pam, and brother, Isaac, also a Juliana plaintiff, and Miko has been quiet for most of the morning, deferring to Isaac to fill in the gaps when she was tired of talking or just tired of trying to articulate what she wanted to say. But when I ask her the question I ask all the plaintiffs, the one about how they feel about past generations’ role in the climate crisis, Miko gets feisty. This kind of navel-gazing—intellectual meditations on responsibility, on blame—is an obstacle to solving problems, she says.
She lives in Beaverton, a suburb just outside Portland, a place that—like Portland—is sometimes afflicted by a left-leaning righteousness that can tip into made-for-TV hysteria. Thus, Miko’s world can be one of fanatical social causes, her irritation proof that even liberal places can become intolerable on the subject of Earth stewardship. She describes the jousts and one-upmanship about how to be your best environmental self. The debates about whether someone can, for example, be a climate activist and also a meat eater. And then she talks about how much this doesn’t matter. How we need systemic change, not individual quests. And how exhausting all the infighting is. How off-key it sounds in contrast to the worst of climate impacts in the world. Then she sits back, exasperated, and says, “Great. You recycled. Want a cookie?”
It’s hard to blame her for this angst. Miko is Marshallese, adopted into the United States at birth. At the behest of the documentary crew and on the eve of the would-be trial back in October, she traveled to the Marshall Islands with her mother to meet her birth family and to conduct her own interviews about how climate change is affecting the islands. It was her first time in the country, and on the trip she was faced with exactly the kind of lopsided impacts she describes to me now. (Vic Barrett, testifying to his own Indigenous roots in a remote part of the world, will soon describe these same things to Congress.)
Miko describes her birthplace to me. “It’s during the spring when everyone crosses their fingers and hopes that everything’s okay because that’s when the king tides come in,” she says. King tides are normal on the island. But for the Marshallese, “because they’re so close to sea level and storms are stronger because of climate change, it comes in with more velocity and more water. So it’s devastating for the people that live right next to the water.” The island is pretty narrow, she says, so people living on the coast are more at risk. “And there’s no mountains or anything, it’s completely flat.” No place to run to, no place to pack up and move.
The Marshall Islands—twenty-nine coral atolls in the Pacific, home to more than fifty-eight thousand people—are a mere 6 feet above sea level. In the last thirty years, sea level has already risen a foot around the islands because of changing trade winds. Climate change promises more as polar ice sheets melt, oceans warm, and the warmer water expands. Episodes of king tides have already swamped homes, downed seawalls, and washed away graves. In some areas, salt water is killing breadfruit trees, wiping out this crop that’s sometimes used for subsistence, sometimes for cash. Drought is worsening in parts of the islands at the same time. And as storms grow more powerful, they compound damage to coral reefs and fisheries already affected by ocean acidification and rising temperatures.
The options ahead don’t look good: move or build higher. Plans to elevate some portion of the islands have so far not found financial support from the developing world. In one projection by the US Department of Defense, which has a military base in the Marshall Islands, at least one of the atolls will be unlivable by 2030 if the Antarctic ice sheets continue to melt. These are not distant threats. They are scenarios that have already arrived for the Marshallese, people who live day to day in tense negotiation with an encroaching sea.
Miko saw this firsthand when she went for a swim at the beach with her family, saw how her aunt was afraid of the water. How the tide crept over the sand, a strip of muddy shallows the width of a road covering where the beach used to be. A dozen paces into the water, the seafloor dropped precipitously, like the edge of a wall. It made the local people—people who knew how quickly a rogue wave could destroy a home, wash a grave to sea—nervous to stand close.
When Miko interviewed a youth group leader, “She was saying it’s difficult to live . . . when you’re living in fear of whether your house is going to go in the water.”
These are the kinds of outsized problems Miko contrasts with the rank-and-file do-goodery of life in a progressive American suburb. And with debates about hamburgers. To her point, they are not just issues for other people, her people—things that happen on far-flung islands 2,000 miles from Hawaii. Though the most disastrous climate impacts do disproportionately befall people in other nations, on small islands, and in the Arctic and Africa, too, these harms affect Americans every day. And not just because the United States has a long history of immigration, is full of diverse citizens like Miko and other Juliana plaintiffs who feel the acute pain of climate impacts in the places their families come from. But also because climate change is spurring migration, not just to America but within America, in ways that aren’t so easy to see.
One example is that a third of Marshallese people already live in America, spurred to move by economics and opportunity, chiefly to Guam and Hawaii, where they are welcomed by a US compact that offers free passage as compensation for missile testing on the Marshall Islands after World War II and in the sixties.
In Hawaii, scientists predict higher temperatures will spur heat-related illnesses like dengue fever and cholera and stress the plants and animals, making way for invasive species. A decrease in winds is expected to disrupt rainfall, causing droughts and periods of heavy flooding. Warmer oceans and ocean acidity could disrupt marine ecosystems, too, and thus the food supply. All that comes with the stark reality that rising seas will plunge beaches underwater in time, thus tanking an economy that mostly turns on tourism for residents like Journey Zephier, also a Juliana plaintiff, whose cultural practices are also threatened. Journey is a citizen of the Yankton Sioux Nation who has been living in the small village of Kapa‘a on the Hawaiian island of Kauai for the last decade, adopting its language and customs like fire dancing and Tahitian drumming. The island is another place with dying coral and shrinking beaches, set to be underwater by the end of the century.
In 2016, the White House Council on Environmental Quality cohosted the Symposium on Climate Displacement, Migration, and Relocation to advise Hawaiians on how to “plan for and implement voluntary migration” and to address the legal and policy challenges for those for whom relocating will be the only choice.
Miko knows how heart-breaking these decisions can be. So from American mainlanders who live without such problems, she doesn’t want the complaining, the intertribal politics, the partisan bickering, or the blame game about whose fault climate change is and who is doing the most or the least to tend their own garbage patch. She wants policy, results, action large enough to assuage not mainstream American guilt but real suffering.
———
This kind of displacement—the forced kind—is increasingly common as climate conditions worsen, and not just in far-off places like the Marshall Islands.
Of the 16.1 million people displaced by weather-related disasters around the world in 2018, 7.5 percent—or 1.2 million people—were Americans. Hurricane Michael displaced 464,000. The Woolsey Fire in California uprooted 182,000, and the Camp Fire in Paradise another 50,000. Over the years, FEMA has bought tens of thousands of people out of homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy. Looking ahead, scientists predict as many as 13 million people in the coastal US could be affected by sea level rise if the polar ice sheets collapse, possibly spurring “US population movements of a magnitude similar to the twentieth century Great Migration of southern African-Americans.”
Citizens in the Navajo Nation are an example of US mainlanders who face these kinds of frontline risks. And those risks are a primary reason that Jaime Butler, who has lived much of her life thirty minutes north of the Grand Canyon in the Navajo Nation, is a Juliana plaintiff. Unlike the Marshallese, Navajo leaders have found a range of possibilities to adapt to climate change on the reservation. They’re working diligently toward climate redress, and their planning and execution is illustrative of the kind of solutions other communities could undertake in the climate fight.
What such action aims to preserve is this: Jaime on her grandmother’s land as a girl. The flat, dusty earth at her feet, blue sky overhead, and sheep grazing on what plants will grow, days a rhythm in and around the hogán. Jaime does what jobs need doing, her cousins too. She takes care of the sheep, cooks food, fixes things, feeds the herding dogs, and keeps a lookout for the coyotes and wolves whose job it is to try and get the sheep.
Her Grandma Eleanor speaks only Navajo, or mostly Navajo with a bit of English sass, so Jaime has to guess at what her grandmother is saying, intuit what it is she’s supposed to do. This barrier between the languages makes it easier for Jaime to fall into the life of her people. Less distraction, no chatter. It’s a path for Jaime to herd sheep all day and just be on the land in the way Diné were made to be.
“It wasn’t like an actual camp, it was like our parents sending us to our grandma’s house to help her. We called it sheep camp. I guess that’s just the word,” Jaime says. The Navajo are a matrilineal society, which means that women have traditionally owned property and sheep, and that a person’s clan identity comes from their mother’s family. So, to clarify, Jaime’s Grandma Eleanor is not the mother of her mother but the sister of her mother’s father. And what Jaime is describing when she talks about sheep camp is the Navajo practice of passing down traditional ways—kids spending time with their elders in the Navajo Nation, learning how to herd the sheep at the heart of their culture.
“It teaches you a lot about how to manage things when you’re young,” Jaime says. Mostly it teaches Navajo children where they come from. Traditional Diné culture reveres the sheep, holds that to care for sheep is to live in harmony with the earth. Jaime’s family keeps these values close. And like many Navajos who traditionally raise sheep, they eat the sheep in celebration, use sheep fat in ceremony, and some spin wool for yarn dyed with herbs, then weave it in the Navajo style revered for its unique geometry, an economic mainstay.
Jaime grew up a short drive away from her Grandma Eleanor in Cameron, Arizona, in the Painted Desert. It’s a place of less iconic canyons in the southwestern corner of the Navajo Nation, where blue sky meets red rock in stark lines, striations riding siltstone and mudstone and climbing out of the dusty earth in every hue of red and lavender. This corner of the world is rich in ways other than the commercial ones, with a deep cultural heritage and long traditions, though with patches of cruel economics. The great swath of land sits at the four corners of Utah and Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico in a chunk the size of Ireland. A century and a half ago, the Navajo entered into a treaty with the United States, which, among other provisions, ceded much of these original homelands to the Diné in a permanent reservation.
Since Jaime was a young girl herding sheep by day, hair over shoulders in one photo, dark eyes shining, she has had few departures from this life and this land—stints in Flagstaff about an hour away. Even now, when she is a student at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, this land never really leaves her. “Every time I go back there, I feel like I’ve just been recentered. And I just become connected to the Native American part of myself, even though I’m kind of usually just at home, watching TV.” Being on the reservation, being able to talk to relatives, to be in that country with the people who have only ever been there with her, it’s a way of coming home that Jaime feels acutely. The thought of losing it to the brutality of climate change—it is deeply, profoundly unsettling.
She describes this possibility not like a relocation, like a regrettable move for a job or for school, but like a dislocation of the soul, like the cutting of a person in half. It is one thing to move. Jaime has done it before for college. But home is home. And if she is forced to never live there again, or even visit, because of the way this land is remade by climate change, uninhabitable, “I think that’s when all hope is lost. I think then once we can’t live where we’ve been living for thousands of years, our culture is completely gone.”
———
That the Navajo Nation has become a kind of ground zero for climate change is in the realm of the scientifically indisputable. The USGS has spent years measuring its unique combination of less rain, less snow, and climbing temperatures. Scientists have found that few springs still flow on the reservation, and that the Little Colorado is 10 percent of its former width in parts, down to 100 feet wide in Cameron from a former 1,250. At Many Farms Lake, a fishing lake two hours away, the water level has fallen from 16,000 acre feet to a few feet of silt in a muddy bottom. Snow depth across the Navajo Nation has similarly decreased by two-thirds since the 1930s, from an average foot of snowfall to 4 inches. Vegetables like traditional corn don’t grow well or at all anymore. And the groundwater loss one can see in the Little Colorado is everywhere. The Navajo Nation’s four main wells are an ongoing bustle of need, so much so that some people arrive as early as 3 a.m. to get the water that tends to dry out by 8 a.m. Or they travel longer on hard roads in search of water.
Scientists looking for facts about how these conditions have changed, and when the Navajo Nation got so dry, have found them recorded both in documents and in the memories of Diné elders. Both point to the same year, 1944, as the last in which the climate was wet and the snow accumulated in drifts, burying horses to their chests, with rain falling daily in the wet season. Now snow melts quickly, the storms too brief and infrequent to replenish the dry rivers and streams. There is no record of any year without snowfall before 1982, but between 2002 and 2011 there were eight years of little or no snow at all.
Rainfall has similarly declined since the 1990s so that the climate has been one of profound drought ever since. In 2009, for example, it rained only 3 inches. And the summer monsoons that used to make for a steady rainy season now come in intense, massive storms that further damage the land. All this means that where people once grew gardens and fruit, and farmed crops like corn, there is little but dry sandstone to usher in the planting season.
In Jaime’s lifetime, the nineteen years in which the Little Colorado has shrunk, the world of wildlife around the river has shrunk with it, reduced to lizards. She describes how traditional herbs are getting farther away. Navajo tea, for example, a plant with a tiny yellow flower that grows in the desert, is one she remembers finding easily on walks near the Grand Canyon. Now, she says, you have to find a vendor or someone who has traveled to harvest it. This is a compromise of sorts. And it is the same with all the other herbs. Like the bitterroot for guarding against bad spirits. Or herbs used just for ceremonies, for traditional foods, or in prayer. In times past, Jaime’s elders didn’t need to have stashes of such things. The desert offered the plants and people used them. Today, these herbs are things to be hunted in markets or in long walks across the land like the elusive prey they are.
Navajo leaders troubled by these trends have undertaken a robust effort to do all they can to halt them. The nation’s climate adaptation plan includes everything from deploying renewable energy to reviewing and revising who has what water rights and exploring ways to recycle water. Where headwaters and wetland habitat can be restored or preserved to recharge aquifers, the tribe aims to do so. And critically, the Navajo Nation also plans to halt the use of groundwater for mining, something that’s been done in the past to tap the nation’s rich coal and uranium deposits. Even things as rote as communicating about climate change and ways to fight it are part of this work, with education plans for 4-H groups and presentations in every district, where regular meetings about livestock and grazing tend to attract a crowd.
Now, wildlife technician Janelle Josea’s job is to knock on doors, visit people. This includes the people who live deep in the desert and tend their sheep, speak Navajo, and don’t much think about sending their kids to school. Her primary job is to educate, armed with booklets and PowerPoints, a mission conceived in 2014 when the Navajo Nation started work on its climate adaptation plan, holding meetings in each of its districts to gauge what people were most concerned about. And as a first course of action, it falls to Josea and three colleagues at the Navajo Nation Department of Fish and Wildlife to tell everyone on the reservation—about 175,000 people—what the plan is.
“There are a lot of people who are lacking this knowledge. Or even just knowing what climate change is,” she says. “We really want to get this out and make sure our community understands it, and that climate change is real and it’s happening now” and that the tribe is doing something about it.
Drastic changes to reverse these trends could occur worldwide if the United States conducted the very same analysis and planning that the Navajo are already undertaking. New water allocations. New grazing plans. Waste management programs, and revised timber and land management practices, too, along with the powering down of coal. It’s not rocket science. It’s arguably much easier than rocket science.
These days, the Navajo Nation’s climate adaptation strategy calls for livestock management—outlawing the use of studs and artificial insemination, adopting horses off the reservation, enforcing these laws, and passing new laws to protect the enforcers. Some of these ideas run roughshod over old ways. Over just leaving well enough alone. And these tough conversations about having to manage resources, manage animals, they’re the ones Josea and her co-workers need to have.
“Whatever works for us, great,” says Josea. “If it doesn’t, we can change that. That’s why getting experiences and any kind of feedback from our community members as far as living conditions—that is helpful.”
The Navajo Nation, like the United States, must still wrestle with its own fossil fuel dependence. Though the reservation has a long relationship with coal, and the tribe receives millions in payments from coal, gas, oil, and timber sales, the nation also anticipates the closure of two of its four coal-fired power plants by 2025 and recently closed a coal mine. While that’s good for climate change, it brings the same economic hardships that befall other communities that depend on fossil fuels. Hundreds of lost jobs are no small issue in a place where 40 percent of the people are already living below the poverty level. The tribe anticipates $35 million in budget cuts in 2021, and it isn’t clear whether renewable energy can replace what income has been lost, though the tribe has issued a proclamation to make developing it a priority.
In this way, what the Navajo Nation can do, it does. One-third of the reservation’s population is younger than eighteen, and tribal leadership takes seriously its obligation to look out for its youth. But it can’t restore nature’s balance unless the rest of the world helps. These issues, they’re part of bigger trends that can’t be battled on the reservation alone.
Case in point: intensifying wind makes it hard for native plants to take hold, which makes it almost impossible to keep sand from accumulating, drifting, edging ever closer to homes and roads. Already there’s a new kind of dust rising up, covering things in dunes. Scientists say it rises out of the dry riverbeds, like the dry expanse of the Little Colorado, and roves when no plants can take root to hold it. In fact, nearly a third of the Navajo Nation is covered in roving sand dunes now. The USGS has been trying to calculate how these dunes move as they do things like swallow up roads, fill horse corrals, and advance on people’s homes, a new Sahara looking for purchase. The sand destroys farmland and suffocates plants. It covers rangeland, too, so there is less room for animals to graze.
These facts and the fact of water loss have turned conversation to reducing livestock on this reservation where sheep once ruled the economy, with woven textiles and millions of pounds of wool being brought to trading posts. Now, people in some parts of the Navajo Nation have to guard against dust pneumonia when the wind blows, hunkering down in conditions like a modern-day Dust Bowl, and there is talk of whole communities being relocated out of the way of the sand.
Such sand is not just a threat to the Navajo but also an accelerant of problems in other parts of the West. When the sand drifts, it ranges as far as the Rocky Mountains and lays a dark silt on the snow there, causing the snowpack to absorb more light and melt faster than it used to.
“I think a common misconception about climate change is it’s just global warming so everything is just going to get warmer,” Jaime says. “But this is a whole planet. And if something changes, it’s going to affect something else.”
———
Growing up here, Jaime learned about climate change when she was nine. When she joined Juliana v. United States at fourteen, she did it for the animals because she worried about what climate change would do to them. But Jaime worries more today about what climate change will do to her and to other Navajo people like her. Sometimes these concerns—about harms to the animals and harms to the Diné—are more or less the same concerns.
The summer of 2013 underscores what she means. That year the drought lasted into what used to be the rainy season. And the wild horses that roamed free, many were dying of thirst. There were reports of horses with ribs sticking out, horses found dead at dried-up watering holes, and horses who tried to kick their way into watering tanks for a drink.
The horses were a new kind of problem, generally. The land was already overtaxed by drought, and the horse population was meanwhile growing larger all the time. The Navajo had lived peacefully with feral horses for decades, but with the drought, they had to confront the reality of the land not being able to support the horses along with all the rest. The Diné were having cultural clashes over what should be done, whether the horses ought to be rounded up and adopted off the reservation or sold. Such talk collided with traditional values, like the value to just let the horses be. But no matter their feelings, people cared about the horses and did not want to see them suffer. That summer, the drought in the central part of the reservation was especially unyielding. In one report, the Navajo Times relayed the tale of a herd fighting for a wet patch of mud where a faucet had dripped, their bodies queued up so thick it was impossible to tell until after they were loaded into trailers, too tired and malnourished to fight, what the commotion was even about. Only after they were cleared away did the tiny spot of wet ground show.
A few years later, the spring of 2018 brought drought so severe that Jaime remembers it more starkly than most. The winter was drier than ever before, the spring runoff sparse, and there was no snowpack to feed the watering holes where the horses and livestock went to drink when the rivers ran dry. “In one part near Cameron . . . there’s like this little flat part that absorbs a ton of water,” Jaime says. She’s talking about a stock pond where animals have long come for water in the worst of times, the water brackish and left to the wild. That year it was a sliver of itself. And what water was there was being swallowed, slowly, by the dusty soil underneath. The sparse water on dry soil—the two mixed like porridge, not like something you could drink. “It just became quicksand. Right in the middle of it, there was just a small pond, a little puddle basically. And because there was no other water in the area, all the wild horses around there came and tried to get the water.”
More than 110 horses died in the mud, maybe more than could be safely counted after others slipped deep underground. Their bodies were found in a ring around the puddle, their coats caked in hardened earth from struggling for anything to drink. The ground around this muddy circle was dusty, held the bones of dead horses past, and later it was encircled in barbed wire so officials could move on to what came next: excavating bodies to deter scavenging birds and dogs, avoid disease, and clear out the smell.
“It’s just kind of rough seeing things go down that we have no control over. It affects everyone,” Jaime says.
For the rest of the summer, people hauled water for themselves and for the horses too. Rescue organizations sent hay and plastic tubs to make safe troughs. In another year of ceaseless drought, filling the tubs would become a new kind of normal.
These conditions horrify Jaime. And she worries most for older members of her community, like her grandmother.
“It’s just really strenuous on the elders, who are the main people who still have our culture,” Jaime says. She explains how many still live alone in the traditional earthen homes, tending their flocks of sheep and horses in the vast empty parts of the desert. They haul their own water, gather their own plants; some farm their own food. They face a tougher job as water gets scarcer.
Advancing age already makes life difficult for Jaime’s Grandma Eleanor, older than eighty and living alone with sheep and a couple of horses. Jaime says her grandmother sometimes spends hours driving for water. She used to just drive into Cameron, but since there isn’t enough water in Cameron for everyone, the wells run dry and she has to go to Tuba City, another half an hour away, or another hour to Flagstaff, sometimes even farther to Leupp.
Because the elders are the keepers of the old ways, the water gone out of the land can spell the tradition gone out of it too. If elders are no longer able to live a traditional life, there is less of a way for the younger generations to learn.
For Jaime, for many Diné, this learning is her spiritual core. Sheep camp was a summertime ritual, and though there was room indoors, she and her cousins often slept in the bed of their Grandma Eleanor’s pickup truck, armed with BB guns. “She would mainly do it just to make sure that we could keep a lookout on the sheep, because summer is when the wolves just go crazy—or the coyotes,” Jaime says. “It was really fun . . . if it was just a coyote, we would just yell at it and throw rocks, we wouldn’t have to use the BB gun.” Actual encounters of this sort were rare. Less rare: the nights in the pickup, tucked in blankets with cousins, the sky a cocoon of stars.
Preserving land and culture, preserving spiritual practice, these are the kinds of things Jaime gets to point out when she feels inclined to talk to press about why she is a plaintiff. That doesn’t happen often. Life on a reservation didn’t really prepare her for how public, how social being a Juliana plaintiff would turn out to be. “There’s no major news outlets. There’s nothing crazy going on.” Life in and around the Navajo Nation is a thing that moves to its own clock, and it seems to be a slower clock than the one running the news cycle.
In the stints between canceled hearings, when the only job to do is to give talks or talk to the press, Jaime finds herself shrinking back. She is not outgoing. Not particularly talkative. And she finds it hard to figure out what to say. Crippling, even, when the interviews stack up, one after another in short spans of time. She has the challenge of being an introvert. Of recharging alone and struggling in situations when there are just enough people around to make things feel like a circus. It isn’t in her nature to run toward such things. And while she has friends among the plaintiffs and likes them, she finds herself drifting away after gatherings and meetings, avoiding the press and going back to her own quiet corner of the world, where things move at her own pace in a land she understands.
“At the same time, I think because of my culture, this is the reason why I am doing it. The whole reason,” Jaime says.
———
This specter of displacement, of cultural and spiritual loss, is already a reality for millions of people worldwide. It is more unusual for Americans than for people in other parts of the world. Many who face displacement elsewhere are also from Indigenous communities, with nations in Africa and in Asia, as well as island communities home to some of the most immediate climate impacts. In this way, Vic Barrett will tell congressional leaders in September 2019, developed nations are foisting the worst of the impacts of climate change onto people of color, often people who are the least able to bear it.
Even though 25 percent of the carbon dioxide that’s accumulated in the atmosphere since the industrial age is attributable to the United States—and the government admits this, from its own filings in the Juliana case—it is poorer communities, often communities of color, that face the worst impacts.
To explain this to a joint meeting of committees on climate and foreign affairs in the House of Representatives, and in an op-ed in the Guardian, Vic will point to his Garifuna people, the Afro-Indigenous community from the Caribbean island of St. Vincent first displaced by British colonizers in the eighteenth century to eastern Honduras and Belize, and now in danger of being uprooted again by sea level rise from climate change.
The Garifuna are a community known for contributions to percussion-driven music and fish-based cuisine, who bring island flare to a Latin world, who, like many migrant communities, live with a kind of day-to-day otherness in ordinary Honduran society. Which makes them especially vulnerable as another group of people facing more intense and frequent storms in a land set to be underwater in a few decades. Already, the offshore coral reefs central to the fishing culture of the Garifuna are being eroded by the bleaching effects of rising temperatures and nutrient imbalance. Vic grew up in New York. But his family has lived on oceanfront land in Honduras—Vic’s inheritance—for generations. That, too, is about to be underwater.
“Frontline communities around the country and around the world are already feeling the effects of the climate crisis, from the dispossession of land to the grave public health threats that are disproportionately affecting myself and other young people,” Vic tells congressional leaders. He’s at a microphone and flanked by young climate leaders, Greta Thunberg on his right, a row of Juliana plaintiffs at his back. “These frontline communities are made up of people who look like me. Young. Black and brown. LGBTQ. Indigenous. Identities which place them at significantly higher risk to experience the impacts of climate change than the general populace, due to their marginalized status in our society.”
These factors make climate change a profound social justice issue, Vic will write. An issue, he notes, that moves talk of climate justice past intergenerational inequities and to questions of poverty and of race. It’s an issue that provokes a central, unsettling question about fairness and American culpability that is perhaps more distant from the national conversation about climate change than it should be: Who benefits from a fossil fuel economy, and who pays? Not just abroad, but in America too.