Everyone is looking forward to what the court will rule. But for months, there is nothing.
Then in September, Greta Thunberg arrives in America via sailboat, en route to the United Nations Climate Change Conference, set to take place in Chile in December. While in the US, she testifies to Congress alongside plaintiff Vic Barrett, who speaks of his Garifuna people while Greta submits an IPCC report into the record and urges elected leaders to “listen to the scientists.”
Avery is in an overflow room with a bunch of other people when this happens, watching on the TV monitors. Before the committee, Greta and Vic, Jamie Margolin, and a fourth young activist are seated at a wooden dais, microphones pointed at the mouths of each. At Greta’s end of the table, at least a dozen photographers are clamoring for the closest close-up of her. After a committee chair makes a speech about the failure of his own generation to address the climate crisis, a few other congressmen clear their throats for a while before the youth are given five minutes each to speak. Tens of thousands of fires have just burned across the Amazon, so Amazon forest protectors are seated behind them. They wear beaded headbands and sashes and are listening to a translation via headphones.
Here’s what the young people say: that the world is promising them a future that isn’t there, that careers and trips to natural places are a mirage, that their generation lives with fear and despair, that they face psychological impacts for life and are being discriminated against by a government that panders to corporations making billions off the destruction of their fates. “How do I convey to you what it feels like to know that within my lifetime the destruction we have already seen from the climate crisis will only get worse?” Jamie asks. After they patiently take turns testifying, urging Congress to take action, they answer questions while the congressmen prod. They are asked about their fear. Asked to comment on world politics. And lectured by Representative Garret Graves, a Republican from Louisiana, about such things as the “charade” of the Green New Deal, China’s projected emissions increases under the Paris Accord, and how Americans make cleaner gas than Russians. In the committee room, there is decorum and quiet, process and procedure, professionalism, if hollow at times. Save for the point where Jamie calls inaction “cowardly” and “shameful,” there is a sense that process is under way, action is being considered, that the US government is still working, even as half the committee chairs are empty, many representatives having found something else to do.
In the overflow room, however, what is happening is something different. When congressmen break in with questions for the youth—queries like: How can we address the climate crisis without regulation?—Avery says, “This one guy would get on his phone—he was just watching with us—and he’d search something and go, ‘This person has accepted blank amount of money from the fossil fuel industry.’ He would call it out.” This knowledge, it feels like power to her fourteen years. It also disabuses her of any hope that our nation’s leaders are there to act on her behalf.
The Juliana youth have been learning these lessons on Capitol Hill for years now, and this particular trip is no different. They are keeping brutal itineraries to meet with national leaders on climate change, running from the Senate to the House through the tunnels under the Capitol, back and forth through security. Even as they do, it is clear that much of the effort is wasted. Avery is buoyed by the people who are happy to greet them, happy to hear their concerns. “You get to meet really cool people who are actually doing something and actually do care,” she says. Those meetings feel like wins. Then there are the losses. “I’ve definitely spoken with people who are not at all there and just super, ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, oh that’s cool. Uh-huh, look what I’m doing. Oh, I’m not going to let you talk. I’m going to talk about me! Okay, gotta go! Bye!’ Oh god, it’s disgusting,” she says. Like the meeting where an elected official booked half an hour with the Juliana plaintiffs, kept them waiting for most of it, then walked in, shot a selfie with Levi, and left.
They press on. In the days that follow, Greta’s celebrity is so out of control that she turns up at things just to lure the media, then sits on the sidelines so that others can speak. She tries to do this one afternoon when the Juliana plaintiffs hold a press conference in front of the Supreme Court with supporting members of Congress, but the media will not leave Greta alone. Levi and another young activist have to body block Greta to create some space, and Levi ends up having to call security about a cameraman who won’t back off. When the guy lies about his aggression, starts arguing with Levi and the other activist in front of the adults, Levi gets mad enough that he has to be carried off by Vic, who, as he extracts him, reminds everyone that Levi has only just turned twelve.
It’s all a bit of a detour from what the plaintiffs have to say. But they say it anyway. In front of the whitewashed facade of the court, flanked by marble statues and other plaintiffs, Xiuhtezcatl and Kelsey take turns at a microphone with a handful of people in leadership. Kelsey speaks to the foible of her experience in Washington, DC, lets loose with the anger of how some of it feels. This last week of meetings, there were days where it seemed like she was the only adult in the room.
“I feel extremely let down. By history. By the decisions of our elders past. I feel . . . old. I’m twenty-three years old. I’ve been doing this for more than half my lifetime,” she says. Cobalt blouse, brown boots, the sky behind her is a brilliant blue, the clouds puffy and idyllic. She says she’d rather be celebrating the mobilization of the youth climate movement, be glad to just be here together, but she can’t. “I’m the oldest of my cohort of plaintiffs and in many of the meetings with members of Congress this week, it is very apparent that I’m the oldest as well. How shameful that we are in such a fragile system. As a planet, as a nation, as a society.”
Privately, this feeling of aging out, it is wearing. The older she gets, the more Kelsey feels out of place advocating for youth. In several of her meetings on Capitol Hill, she found herself explaining climate science to staffers who were roughly her own age, interns and upstarts who already have the information. She can see through their maneuvers. Has become more strategic. Feels uncomfortable in rooms full of rowdy kids. And lately she’s begun to long for the classroom, for working closely with children again, for getting back to the spaces where she feels most at home, not out of place among high-level thinkers and scholarly types. They don’t feel like her people. And the critiques and asides, they are exhausting. The ones that let her know she’s always being watched (on Facebook, “I saw you in the cafeteria with a plastic fork,” or this one by email: “You need to cover up. You were wearing a tank top, not painting a picture of youth innocence”).
But what she tells the crowd is that the older she gets, the more she feels a responsibility to people who are younger. And the more she feels that responsibility, the more she has to keep fighting, feels like she is begging to be heard. “We are talking about our lives. We are asking those individuals who seem to be putting guns to the foreheads of all youth, to not only not pull the trigger but remove your weapon.” She sounds frustrated as she says this. But she keeps her voice strong. It is time, she says, for the adults to see the toll their indifference is taking. The burden the young now carry. And to stop asking the young for the sacrifice of childhood at the altar of begging for change.
That sacrifice, Xiuhtezcatl says, it weighs. On his turn at the microphone, black blazer over a T-shirt, he says when he met these other plaintiffs at fifteen, he felt a “unique sense of relatability with one another’s stories.” Before then, he didn’t always have a community, didn’t feel a sense of power. He holds his hand up briefly—the height he was when his advocacy started—and talks about the isolation of that work for himself and others, especially the times that it went unacknowledged because of race. Now his sister is eleven. Paints. Loves her kittens. “I look at her and I think about myself when I was eleven years old and even just then my entire life was absorbed by this work. Even at eleven, I was traveling all over the place, speaking, rallying, mobilizing.” He wants her to have another kind of life. Wants to keep her and other kids out of this struggle for body, for life, for childhood, to do a thing politicians have been too afraid to do.
Maybe it will happen now that the voices of these Juliana youth are no longer so unique, Xiuhtezcatl says. “We are small pieces of a massive puzzle of an entire generation standing up in our streets, in our courts, in honor of our ancestors and those on the frontlines for generations to leverage this moment in history as the time when we change everything. . . . Whether we make it or not, is entirely up to each and every one of us.”
———
Our Children’s Trust has an office betting pool. Even the most pessimistic in the bunch bet that the court will rule in October. Then October comes and goes. With it, the first anniversary of the almost-trial. Still, there is no word from the Ninth Circuit about whether the trial can go forward.
By November, when no decision comes, the mood around climate action recalibrates yet again. Even the parents of the Juliana youth start to talk about direct action, about what might be necessary to spur actual, lasting change, if not through litigation and the courts. These are discussions at first. But then they start to become real. Not undertaken by the parents, but by other people who no doubt have similar feelings, who see nonviolent direct action garnering results overseas. On Halloween, I’d met with two organizers from a resistance group in Portland, Oregon, who had given me a heads-up about a protest soon to unfold on the Columbia River. Over the next few days, there were text messages and conversations. Then, the night of November 4, another text: an address and a time to arrive, 3 a.m.
I don’t know where I’m going, but I go. I’ve been told that a group of activists intends to protest a ship headed for the Port of Vancouver, and when I arrive at the address they have given me, it turns out to be a parking lot near a public dock in Vancouver, Washington. People are quietly readying themselves in the dark. And after I step out of the car to get some basics from an organizer, I see Kiran hop out of another car, looking, by their own description, like a Power Ranger: white dry suit with stoplight red shoulders and shins, a red knit cap to match. The dry suit is unzipped and the top of Kiran’s body is coming out of it like a banana out of the peel: Kiran in wool sweater, the arms of the suit dangling at the waist. Apparently there are a few base layers underneath. Kiran is prepared to be cold. It is 37 degrees outside, no doubt cooler on the water. And this night looks to be long.
Until a couple of hours ago, when an organizer let it slip, I did not expect to see Kiran here. They live three hours away in Seattle. But this is what it has come to now. From early days, Kiran has been encouraged not to get arrested. All of the Juliana plaintiffs are supposed to avoid getting arrested—it is part of the agreement they made when they signed on to be plaintiffs in the case, the agreement to behave themselves. Now Kiran is about to climb the pilings under a dock on the Columbia River and chain up to it. In another hour, they will disappear into a foggy night on a Zodiac toting a dry bag and a hammock, ringed by climbing rope and chain. This unexpected encounter, I’m not sure what to think.
For now there is just the time killing. There are six climbers in this parking lot, plus a handful of people who will soon provide support to them and to members of the media like me. I don’t know it yet, but a dozen or more kayakers are assembling somewhere upriver, and boats are motoring in from every direction. One of the organizers is nervous: we are a spectacle. Get in the cars, he says. So we do.
What’s about to happen here has to do with a bulk carrier called Patagonia that has been slowly making its way toward the United States from India. An international effort has tracked this ship while it travels. Greenpeace lent a hand to Portland Rising Tide, the local group whose members have been waiting for the boat to arrive, in keeping watch over it. There’s been intel from the ground, too, though I’m not especially clear who provided this information, where they were, or what it was. First Nation groups from Canada and a water-based direct action group from northern Washington called Mosquito Fleet are also in the mix, with some of their members among those in the parking lot and in the kayaks.
The ship’s cargo is what’s at issue.
The vessel is carrying some of the more than 3.7 million feet of pipe that’s been manufactured for the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project in Canada, which will boost the capacity of oil transport from the Alberta tar sands to the coast of British Columbia. The $7.4 billion expansion is projected to triple the 300,000 barrels of oil currently transported from Edmonton and will carry heavier oils with higher potential to emit greenhouse gas, making it a possible trigger of climate tipping points. Thus it is hotly contested. Kinder Morgan used to own this project but abandoned it amid opposition from First Nation and environmental groups and lawsuits from provincial and municipal governments. It’s since been acquired by the Canadian government, which continues to fund the expansion despite public opposition.
Kiran and I sit in my car while the rest of the group divides themselves among a few others. I have a lot of questions. I’m not sure why Kiran is doing this, breaking rank with the Juliana cohort and behaving in public in a way they’ve agreed not to. But the deeper we get into this conversation, the more it’s clear that as much as Kiran believes that when you want to make change you try all the doors, lately there is a feeling that the front door, the courthouse door, is locked. Kiran feels they have been standing at that door for four and a half long years while the system just teases them.
“Part of why I’m here is to just give them a little reminder that they can play with us in the system, but we don’t have to stay in the system to have our voices heard,” Kiran says.
Kiran is aware of what this kind of comment means, what this action means. Not just that they are about to get arrested and that this second protest arrest will likely confine Kiran to a life of working at nonprofits—there have been three rejected job applications recently, due to a prior arrest for trespass—but also that by letting this sentiment fly in the news, Kiran is using their celebrity so that this protest can be seen. This worked, after all, when Kiran was arrested with fifty-one other people when they blocked a train at a Shell and Tesoro facility in 2016. The subsequent press thwarted a potential expansion that would have meant large increases in oil trains traveling through Washington.
Now, Kiran’s presence could bring more attention to the arrival of this bulk carrier and to the plan to spirit these pipes from one of the quieter Pacific Northwest ports north via rail. The celebrity that attends being a Juliana plaintiff has become a strategic lever that can be pulled for the right opportunities. And without Kiran’s willingness to pull it in this case, the media eye will wander, zip from Trump to wildfire to Trump to wildfire and race right past the climate fight, past most of the action to stop the climate breakdown. Earlier today eleven thousand scientists issued a declaration that the planet is in a climate emergency and the world’s people face “untold suffering due to the climate crisis” unless there are major transformations to global society. Still, I had trouble selling an article about this protest and the fact that the companies involved in the Trans Mountain expansion had to shop around for a port willing to accept this acutely unpopular bit of cargo, a political hot potato, before Kiran offered to stand in front of the story.
By the end of the day, several local newspapers and news stations will have failed to report that this port is shut down. The news will come a day later, after five people are arrested, as if it is the police activity that makes all of this relevant, the message of the activists and the action they have taken, the level of risk assumed, just humdrum crimes committed against the establishment instead of the other way around. The Port of Vancouver USA Commission recently promised to support renewable energy and avoid new fossil fuel terminals, so it seems ironic that this is the port to accept the cargo that will further open the tar sand export market. But this political slippery slope isn’t deemed newsworthy locally either. The news industry’s attitude toward the whole affair is that what is happening in the United States is merely something about a pipe, the situation in Canada irrelevant, and even though this combination of events could create a climate tipping point that greatly impacts us all, few people are taking the time to put it together.
We talk about this media circumstance while we kill the next hour in the car. And about other things. About the generation gap. About the roots of folk punk. About whether the English language needs nonbinary words for niece, nephew, aunt, uncle. About church and music. The environmental movement and its history. And then it is time. Kiran gets a text and we step out of the car into the frigid night air. Probably it is 35 outside now. It is very foggy—not a good night for boating—but there is nothing to be done about that. The other climbers and their support team are scattered among the other vehicles. One is a van with curtains where the climbers will suit up. The group cloistered inside of it seems to be potentially large, but I can’t tell how many are in there in the dark. Like always, some are a little nervous about my presence, but I try to talk to them about why they are there anyway. Some talk to me, some don’t. Some ask me not to use their names. Another gives me the name of an animal to be revised later if it becomes okay to speak. What he means is, to be revised if he gets arrested and his presence becomes known. At that point, there is nothing to lose.
Lydia Stolt says it is okay to write about her. She is nineteen. She is an experienced climber and tied the harnesses that the team will be using. She shows me the knots, the clips and ropes. At first she doesn’t want me to use her name or this information about her—she is worried she will lose the scholarship she won for college—but then she changes her mind. When I ask her why she is here, Lydia says, “I fear for my future. It’s zero hour and I can’t watch the earth die around me. I don’t want to be thirty and telling my kids that I didn’t do anything.”
We move the cars to another parking lot, quickly assemble on the pavement above the public dock, and the tension amps up quickly. There are boats lined up along the dock below us: a handful of Zodiacs, a skiff, and a sport boat. A security vehicle passes in the parking lot once, twice. The support team moves quickly to the boats. Assembled on the dock then are organizers and press—me and a photographer, also a freelancer who has just turned up—plus a couple of activists who plan to livestream whatever happens next. Some of the boats have distinct jobs: to ferry the climbers, to act as liaison with the police, and to ferry the journalists. The climbers are still huddled in the van, still making last preparations and staying out of sight until it is time to launch.
We’re not doing anything illegal—just a bunch of people on a public dock in the night—but there’s a sense that might not matter, that what’s happening here could be interrupted in any number of ways. The driver of the sport boat says the fog is horrible, that boating in it is terrifying. It doesn’t matter. There is no time to wait. The boats are loaded up with gear and food, life jackets dispersed, everyone with lamps and all-weather gear. When it’s clear the boats are ready, a text goes up to the van. Encrypted, of course. All of these communications have been encrypted, messages that disappear shortly after they arrive.
In a few minutes, the climbers appear. I look up just in time to see them, equidistant from one another, swiftly moving across an overhead gangplank, a backdrop of streetlights. They walk with a uniform stride, each their own silhouette: figure in dry suit, helmet, headlamp, ropes and chains dangling. Each has a dry bag off the hip, a hammock strapped to their back. I might never forget this image, this purposeful procession, eerie in lowered heads, rounded shoulders. Resignation. I don’t have a camera ready so I stare until it is gone. It is clear then how much what is about to happen is not the pastime of people eager to be agitators. Not clownish, no impulse in it. For all the contrary portrayal that might follow, that often follows such things, it’s a moment that’s been carefully considered by the people inside of it. It is the culmination of a lot of planning and a lot of work. There are backup plans, bailout plans, safety plans with the ropes and helmets. Every climber is carrying food and water, and yes, wearing diapers. Every situation has been carefully mulled. No one wants anything to go wrong here. But it could. There are dangers besides arrest. And in these last minutes, as Kiran moves swiftly past me, it’s hard to suppress an impulse to stop them.
The climbers drop into a boat that whisks them quickly into the night. I load into the media boat. It is so foggy that there is nothing to see around us but the black river and the nearby light of a highway bridge, slight reflections on the water a couple of dozen yards around us. I can’t see the opposite shore. Can’t see the channel. Can’t make out the pedestrian bridge that juts out over the water just a few dozen yards upriver. It occurs to me to hope that the pilot knows what he’s doing. He says again how terrifying the route in was, but that it’s better now. It is not very reassuring. I am carrying a headlamp and two flashlights so I offer to throw them on the water, but he tells me it will only illuminate the fog, make things worse, so we untie the boat and drive slowly away, fog light off the stern.
It’s just after 6 a.m. and while the cold has been bitter since we arrived three hours ago, it is even colder on the water. The temperature of the air drops by a few degrees as we head toward the port terminals, the temperature of the wind falling by a few degrees more. The dock where the Patagonia will make port is not far. We are there in minutes. The ship is set to arrive in about an hour, so by the time we reach the terminal, six climbers are already making their way up the ladders under the pier—two to a piling, spaced along the dock—in spite of the lack of light.
Kiran moves slowly, each step absorbing attention.
“After every moment, I got something clipped and then I took a breath. Rest. Then I got something else clipped. And then I took a breath,” Kiran says. “I’m not a super-confident climber.” Ending up in the water is not really part of the plan. Kiran is an appreciator of action movie classics, was excited when Harrison Ford talked of attending the trial. Now Mission Impossible comes to mind.
Then the last step. The lock-in. The assembling of the hammock and the climbing inside. Kiran has been up since the morning of the day before, running on pure adrenaline and the vegan calzones that were supplied to the team. The middle-aged people in the effort really knew how to bring the food, Kiran noted, and they were glad for it. The wait had been lovely. A comfortable Victorian house with plenty to eat and beer. The climbers had smartly loaded calories the night before, as the Patagonia moved downriver and the deployment time kept shifting—3 a.m. to 4 a.m., back to 3 a.m.—while it wasn’t clear when food might come again. Now the adrenaline is wearing off, the eyelids getting heavy, and to adjust to this new environment is absorbing too. The underside of the dock is loaded with barnacles. It is dark and creepy, and a person cannot help but wonder what else might be down there with the dank, sodden wood.
Lydia locks in below Kiran, so at home on the ropes that she doesn’t climb quickly into her hammock, wants to be out in the elements, swinging, wearing a moose hat with antlers. She is immediately bored. Wishes she’d brought something to do. She starts talking. Kiran can’t meet her there.
“I was just like, ‘I am not on your wavelength right now,’” Kiran says later. “I just told her straight up, ‘I might actually just need to sit here in quiet for a minute.’”
The sun is starting to rise. And underneath, kayakers are collecting in the water, filling the space between where the Patagonia will soon arrive and where the climbers hang in their hammocks, looking from the river like six tiny cocoons woven into the vast breadth of the dock, the dock hundreds of feet long, dozens of feet high.
Chatter begins overhead, workers arriving as the sun rises, and the heckling soon falls on Kiran’s helmet—talk of urination off the dock, jokes about what the climbers will do if they have to take a shit, critiques of their gear, the bits of it and the kayaks that are made from plastic, as if no one knows these are fossil fuel products. None if it is conversation Kiran thinks they should engage. There is too far to go to connect. “If someone doesn’t realize the gravity of the issue . . . and doesn’t realize that we need to change the whole system . . . they’re probably not going to understand anything else I have to say.” Plus, the talk feels political. Like the polarization that is all over the news, gumming up the Internet with tribalism and vitriol, is hanging out on the dock too. As the workers continue to arrive in hard hats, and port security officers in yellow vests radio for police, for Coast Guard, the divide is a thing Kiran can feel. Down the dock, overhead of other climbers, a man stands and suddenly shouts, “Trump! Four more years!” He is loud enough to be heard over the boat motors and the expanse of the water below, a full-lunged effort for the whole of the river. But no one says anything in reply. Down below, it is as if life has briefly skipped a beat while people drag their attention from the situation at hand—tense and dangerous as it is—and from their singular focus on the ship soon to arrive, to yet another insertion of Donald Trump into daily life. It is as if the news cycle has grown legs, stood, and started walking around in the middle of things, yelling.
On the media boat, someone utters, “Well, they’re related.”
And that is all.
Kiran does not talk. Does not want to fight. Does not want this moment of resistance to be swallowed up by anger. Eyes fixed on the fog, now illuminated by a sun that will not pierce cloud today, Kiran has a singular need: to see the ship come into view. While the heckling continues overhead, an image comes to mind. It is an image frequently used by organizers, but in this context it takes on new significance. It is the image of small fish, many of them, forming a fish large enough to swallow the biggest fish of all. The arrival of the Patagonia will only reinforce this. When it finally clears the fog, kayakers all around and the climbers in their tiny hammocks, the sheer hulk of it, the behemoth of what they are fighting, is menacing. The Patagonia is nearly 600 feet long, topped with massive cargo hold hatches and derricks. As it moves into the channel at 8 a.m., the lateral stripe of its red-blue hull noses through the mist like a whale among minnows. A single letter of its name is half the size of a person.
“That was an image that will stay in my mind for a long time. It was ominous,” Kiran says.
The kayaks seem very small. The climbers in the hammocks smaller still. Several kayakers paddle toward the Patagonia as it advances and remain there as the ship arrives broadside along the dock. Once it sidles up alongside the pilings, its enormous size alters the entire landscape. What once was an expanse populated by kayaks, Zodiacs, and the sport boat becomes just a narrow channel, the other boats squeezed into the in-between. By then the Coast Guard has arrived, the officers saying they just want to keep everybody safe. Soon there will be firefighters and police too. And the procession will move downriver to an alternate pier, one where a seventh climber will stealthily deploy and chain themselves in the narrow space between the top of a sheriff’s boat and a crowd of dockworkers overhead, no room to go up or down, only a small fleet of kayaks between them and the Patagonia, foiled a second time. Law enforcement will issue commands then, declaring this even narrower channel a new jurisdiction, ordering evacuation, and the climber will be arrested with four others whose job it is, ironically, to talk to the police.
But before Kiran will climb down, knowing that the Patagonia has passed and there is nothing more to do, there will be the long standoff between the ship and the resistance. Long stretches of blaring foghorn. Of police orders. Of yelling dockworkers. And of mostly quiet resisters, paddling and motoring beneath the vulnerable humans chained to pilings in between. Kiran knows how much is being asked of the dockworkers, of the deckhands, to be thrust outside the normal order of things this way. To be kept from work, standing on dock and deck, and made to consider whether this pipe—this next installment of energy infrastructure—will tip the earth to uncontainable catastrophe. This kind of action, it takes everyone beyond their comfort zone. Takes people outside the ordinary plans of jobs and money and everyday exchanges that are based on the unquestioned assumption that things are all right in America. This kind of off-scripting, it forces people to know that perhaps things are not as all right as they seem.
But what is also knowable, Kiran says later, hanging there in the hammock, staring at the Patagonia edging ever closer, a tugboat pushing it toward the dock, toward the climbers, is that there is something stronger than the rote systems of our world. Stronger than the need for this ship to dock, for clocks to be punched, for workers to unload this pipe, and for trains to carry it northward so that this pipeline can be built and funnel the dirtiest oil on the planet around the globe.
“Their humanity is what I’m putting my bets in,” Kiran says.
And the feeling that comes then—in knowing that other people, not the habitual machinery of progress, will decide the fate of their lives—isn’t fear.
It is safety.