bring something home to (idiom): 1. to impress upon or make clear to. 2. to fasten the blame (for something) on (someone).
The bronchi, the branched air passages of the human lungs, are shaped somewhat like vegetables—like upside-down stems of celery or broccoli, rooted at the throat, flowering into hundreds of millions of alveoli, the sacs that exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide between the air and the bloodstream. Like the stems of plants, these structures serve as transport systems, carrying material from the world outside into the inner world of our bodies.
In the five hours that the Richmond refinery fumed and smoldered on August 6, 2012, the black smoke that spread across the San Francisco Bay Area potentially reached into hundreds of thousands of throats and lungs.
The plume was visible for miles.
Ash fell on all the fields and the soil and the food plants that Urban Tilth had carefully planted in the ground. At times it seemed to Adam Boisvert like a snowfall, ash flaking from the sky onto the cars and the sidewalks, the hanging laundry, the playground equipment. There was also a dark, filmy, gooey material on many surfaces the next day, Doria Robinson noticed. The Urban Tilthers all wondered what might enter the stems and the xylem, the circulatory systems of the vegetables they had grown all summer. What might seep into the ground in the next rain? What might pulse into the waterways and be digested by the oysters of the San Francisco Bay? A ripple of toxins? A poison inhaled into the urban ecosystem and carried outward into the world at large?
Late that night, Chevron announced it would host a town hall–style meeting for Richmond residents the following evening. (On Twitter, someone launched a parody account called @Ch3vronPR and quipped, In PR school, we had nightmares about refineries blowing up in our cities so we built them all in yours. #ChevronFire #ThoughtsDuringSchool.)
Adam and one of his Tilther housemates biked to the Richmond school garden to survey the state of the beds. The day was mild, in the 60s, and the smoke had dispersed. But the signs of the fire were obvious to Adam. Everything had ash all over it. The beds at the school had collected the fallout. Ash on the plants, ash on the soil. The pair pulled tomatoes and squash out by the roots and collected them.
Tania headed to the Greenway Garden and Berryland, where about a half-dozen teen gardeners waited for her, for one of their last days of the summer apprenticeship program. The teens had helped tend food here all summer long, and the gardens were full and ripe, with raspberries and strawberries, the undulating leaves of purple tree collards, beans, basil, cilantro, zucchini, corn, and fat squash. This was supposed to be their second-to-last day of planting, and they were scheduled to have a gardener graduation later that week, an annual rite of passage for each class of apprentices with a party that included a meal of their own hand-grown vegetables. Instead, Tania had to send them away empty-handed. She warned them not to touch the beds. We don’t know if the soil is toxic.
One girl was especially incensed. Why do we even grow food? she shouted. Arms crossed. Why did we do all of this? Tania looked at this young, angry face, not so different from the person she had been as a teen, and felt that the girl was just used to fighting, fighting for her life. She had been here before on this road of hopelessness, Tania thought.
The Tilthers called an emergency meeting to consider what they would do. In that moment, everything was up for discussion, including whether the organization should stop its work altogether. There was a big question around, like, is it safe to grow food in Richmond? Tania remembered. Like, are we feeding people toxic food because there’s all this stuff that’s falling from the sky?
She was also grief-stricken. It’s one of our little pockets of joy, like a little oasis that we create in the community—that’s how I feel every time I’ve helped start a garden. Just to think that we would not be able to do that anymore was another level of heartbreak.
The Tilthers decided there had to be a reckoning. Since its founding, Urban Tilth hadn’t been an overtly political group. Local leaders, including the mayor, had at times invited Doria to run for political office. But she preferred to have her hands in the literal dirt and in the tangible work of growing the community. Doria was forthright: We grow food. We invite people to change the way that they live their lives. But this approach to transforming the city would never work, she realized, if a large corporation could poison all of their efforts without consequence.
The staff of Urban Tilth decided they would stage both a press conference and a protest. We were really mad, as a group, Tania said.
When the evening arrived, the Urban Tilthers gathered with around five hundred other residents and local advocacy and public service groups in the plaza outside the Richmond Civic Center carrying flags and signs with slogans like PEOPLE’S HEALTH NOT CORPORATE WEALTH. The Tilthers wore face masks and bandannas over their noses and mouths, a symbol of unbreathable air, and carried wheelbarrows and trash cans and plastic tubs full of the vegetables that they and the youth had grown. Urban Tilth also held a press conference there. Tania and Adam each gave interviews to journalists. What are you growing right now? a radio reporter asked Tania. As she tried to form the words, she cast a glance at Adam, standing a few feet away as he spoke on camera to a pair of documentarians. When their eyes met, they both began to cry.
Doria also spoke to the media, and she had a firm message for the oil company. We’re not asking, we’re telling Chevron, they have to be accountable, she said. They have to pay. Our entire program is in jeopardy.
At 6:00 P.M. on August 7, 2012, about twenty-four hours after the fire first erupted, doors opened to a three-thousand-seat auditorium where a group of city, county, and regional agency officials, along with Chevron’s spokespeople, sat in a row in front of a mustard-yellow curtain. The room filled quickly, and reporters lurked at the margins, taking video footage and photographs. The head of a Richmond-based charitable foundation* ran the meeting: she tried to defuse the heat from the room before the questions began. Those feeling angry, please stand up,† she instructed the room. Nearly the entire crowd leaped to its feet. They booed the general manager of the refinery as he tried to apologize to the city, and they grew restless as the speakers told the crowd they were still gathering information, still considering how to update local warning systems, still figuring out what had gone wrong.
At the end, the audience was invited to stand at a mic at the front of the room and ask questions. A long line of questioners formed that snaked around the auditorium. One man ran toward the stage carrying a CHEVRON OUT OF RICHMOND sign and shouting the same words until the moderator persuaded him to settle into a seat.
The Tilthers waited, and when their turn came, they carried the by-now-wilted vegetables to the stage, along with a sign that read NOTHING THAT IS POISONED CAN GROW.
Is this contaminated? the group shouted at the panel. And then they began to chant, Tell us now! Tell us now! until other voices joined the chorus and nearly the whole audience was chanting and stomping their collective feet. But the panel never responded and moved to other topics. Some of the Tilther youth headed to the microphone and vented their anger, cursing at the panel. Doria would hear criticism later about their strident tone, but we did not control them. She felt it was important for the youth to have space for their feelings. That blowup was due to a lot of years, maybe even generations, of taking it, years of putting up with poverty, discrimination, and pollution.
Meanwhile, the regional air quality district announced that levels of “potentially toxic pollutants” measured at the scene of the fire were “well under their reference exposure levels” and “not a significant health concern.”
Three days later, that agency backpedaled and announced it had found elevated levels of acrolein, a smelly chemical also present in secondhand smoke and car exhaust. Much later, an independent academic analysis concluded that no one had actually collected reliable information about pollution during the fire. The closest air monitors took no samples until after the fire was over. A year after the accident, Chevron would install a series of fence line air monitors (a bargain it had struck with Richmond in 2010 when the city threatened to raise its taxes). But no one who lived through the 2012 fire would ever know exactly what they had inhaled. During and just after the accident, fifteen thousand people from surrounding communities turned up at hospitals and doctors’ offices, complaining of chest pain, shortness of breath, sore throats, and headaches.
In the days after the protest, Doria received hate mail from those who didn’t agree with her stance. This woman said that we were liars and we weren’t from Richmond. Somebody even wrote twice—they were just so mad. She was criticized by some of her friends and supporters. People were, like, how unruly! But the young folks were heated. They had worked so hard.
At that moment, there was no way we could stay quiet.
From 2012 onward, I would make periodic visits to Richmond. I would drive through the flatlands, photographing the patterns that striped through the city’s grid—abandoned lots beside tiny residential bungalows on sparsely treed streets; unauthorized art galleries of graffiti along walkways, alleys, and industrial corridors, some involving elaborate murals, some scrawled haphazardly; the monumental infrastructure of the port, shipyards, and railyards. I would visit the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park and eat lunch on the patio at an adjacent swanky restaurant, both housed in the old Ford assembly plant. On the other side of the harbor channel, I toured a vintage naval ship docked at the edge of Shipyard No. 3. Here an archipelago of interpretive signs spanned the vast expanse of concrete, paying tribute to the women and men who had helped build wartime vessels—and their stories of triumph over discrimination in a time of prosperity. “At first the shipyards and other war industries attempted to operate only with white men,” writes historian Richard Rothstein, “but as the war dragged on, unable to find a sufficient number to meet their military orders, they were forced to hire white women, then Black men, and eventually Black women as well.” Richmond often bills itself as the home of Rosie—the bicep-flexing, blue-shirted white female worker depicted in U.S. government posters to recruit women for jobs in the defense industries in the 1940s—the symbol of mighty women taking traditional male roles in the workforce. But the histories inscribed here on the shipyard signs said nothing about the soul-crushing economic collapse that came in the decades after the war, nothing about the incredible labor of growing a twenty-first-century city out of old dirt and cracked pavement.
Since my first visit here, something about this city had taken up residence in my thoughts, and I wanted to understand it. Richmond represented a twentieth-century industrial moment of optimism that has since been shattered. And it was not so different from any other such place in America—the hollowed-out manufacturing centers of the Rust Belt; the hurricane-battered oil and gas communities near the Gulf of Mexico. Left-behind places, haunted by toxicity and decaying infrastructure, by a globalized economy that had eviscerated America’s ability to make most things for itself. You could imagine both optimistic and dystopian ends to their stories—one in which such communities lumbered awkwardly but hopefully toward a greener economy, one where wealth might be diffuse and local and spread across many households, like solar panels on rooftops. You could imagine another where such places dried up or sank into polluted backwaters.
The oil industry has underwritten so much of Richmond’s past and present. According to various estimates, between one-tenth and one-third of the city’s annual revenue comes from Chevron.‡ The company is a major philanthropic force, propping up many community organizations. Its supporters knew what kind of bargain they were making. Its opponents especially knew what they were risking. To stand against the refinery required tenacity. But for people like Doria, any benefit Chevron had ever offered to the community was far outweighed by the costs it exacted. Profit at the expense of people’s health and future had no lasting value.
In the fall of 2012, I visited Doria at her yellow house. There were bicycles stacked by the door, along with a pile of old vinyl records, and sets of bags and coats I had to step over to enter her living room. “So many backpacks and bikes around here,” she said offhandedly. It seemed like a theme: she wore a yellow T-shirt emblazoned with the words THE ORIGINAL RIDE OR DIE CHICK. Doria had always loved bikes, she told me. Urban Tilth’s first garden was, after all, on a bicycle path.
By this time, she had begun dating a bicycle enthusiast, entrepreneur, and artist named Najari Smith (who would later become a life partner). Najari had moved to the Bay Area and eventually made his way to Richmond after years of financial struggles in New York City with jobs that never paid him enough to afford rent (forcing him first to live with piles of roommates and, at one point, leaving him homeless, sleeping on trains before reporting to the office). When he and Doria met, he was working as a graphic designer and serving as a volunteer on a city bicycle and pedestrian advisory committee. In the summer of 2012, they had launched a cyclist advocacy group called Rich City Rides. Like Urban Tilth, the goal wasn’t just to fix bicycles (or grow vegetables) but to use these activities to foster something a little more subversive—to make people healthy and energized enough that they might also demand better living conditions in their city. Doria was also running yoga classes by donation downtown, focused on stress reduction. “Part of my personal mission is trying to find other like minds who are just isolated somewhere in the city, who just need to know that they’re not alone and that we also want change and we’re tired of being bullied,” she mused. Bullied by Chevron, she meant.
She made me a cup of tea, and we sat in her living room at a wooden table by the window. Tobias, the cat, squatted beside her.
Just weeks after the fire, she was strikingly optimistic. “It’s a really exciting time to be in Richmond,” she said. That year, the city government had also adopted a new plan that focused all of its decisions on health—its policies now had to take the wellness of city residents in mind. “We have to think through what type of developments we want, what type of industry we want. We want to actively invite the kinds of things that will improve quality of life,” she said. Implicitly this could mean that food gardens would be a high priority and industries that might pollute them would eventually become unsuitable. Doria had an answer to the question that had loomed over her and her staff during the fire. The gardens and farms would stay.
But she also wasn’t comfortable continuing to plant without knowing the soil was safe from contamination. Urban Tilth didn’t offer food to anyone for nine months after the 2012 fire. The organization couldn’t seek any compensation from Chevron to cover any cleanup costs, because the Tilthers had no legal proof of any damage. No one had gathered baseline soil data at the farm and garden sites, and it was therefore nearly impossible to demonstrate harm. Over the next couple of years, Urban Tilth tore out and rebuilt the fruit and vegetable beds on the Richmond Greenway. They had to fundraise to cover all of the replacements. They eventually imported fresh soil and installed sturdier beds—made of pine lumber instead of old driftwood and reclaimed wood—and planted them again.
There is nothing good that can be said about one of the largest industrial disasters in California history, about the injuries sustained by six oil workers who were on-site during the 2012 Richmond refinery fire, about the money the city had to pour into emergency response, about the terror felt by locals who watched the flames tower into the sky that night, about the company pleading guilty to six counts of criminal neglect. There is no silver lining, no path to grace, no revealing plot point in some grand happy parable.
But such a moment sometimes offers up rueful clarity.
In the past, refinery incidents and accidents had been an endemic affliction for Richmond—a problem that the rest of the world mostly chose to ignore.
But by the 2010s the climate justice movement had grown larger, stronger, and more confrontational. After many years that had yielded little progress on climate change, national environmental organizations set their sights on fossil fuel companies. They knew by then that the oil and gas industry had tried to get a free ride, a pass on its responsibilities to the public—by using its lobbying might to disrupt political efforts to regulate carbon emissions from fossil fuels, which are the largest contributor to climate change. They knew that fossil fuel money had also funded organizations like the Heartland Institute, devoted to disinformation, infamous for its efforts to discredit scientists and sow doubt about research and findings on climate change.§ They also understood that if the industry continued to pursue more sources of oil, coal, and gas—such as those extracted from fracked gas and from tar sands—the climate crisis would become even more dire.
In response, even long-established, staid environmental organizations got riled up. In February 2013, for instance, the Sierra Club broke its 120-year prohibition against civil disobedience to join protests against the Keystone XL pipeline; four years later, the organization’s board changed its stance on this type of activism altogether. Climate activists became more willing to engage in a sort of direct combat—including civil disobedience to confront the industry on its own turf. (Analysts even warned that activists had become effective enough to get in the way of planned fuel-extraction projects.) The 2012 fire brought Richmond into the spotlight and drew the attention of national networks of activists.
In August 2013, three days before the one-year anniversary of the fire, hundreds of out-of-towners arrived in Richmond and joined locals for a rally near the BART station. It had all been organized by a coalition that included Communities for a Better Environment (the environmental justice organization that had been fighting Chevron in the courts and had an office in downtown Richmond) and the San Francisco chapter of Idle No More, a network of Indigenous activists. Bill McKibben, normally based in Vermont, attended in person, along with then Richmond mayor Gayle McLaughlin. A motley coalition of supporters assembled with them—including nurses and local labor unions. Some marchers carried sunflowers. Some toted brightly painted signs with slogans like ¡SÍ A LA ENERGÍA LIMPIA! ¡NO MÁS TÓXICOS! (YES TO CLEAN ENERGY/NO MORE POISONS) and WE HAVE A RIGHT TO GROW HEALTHY. Yellow flags with the words STOP CLIMATE CHAOS shook in the breeze. Organizers set up a PA system at the front of the rally, and Doria Robinson gave a speech. She held a bright blue microphone to her mouth and addressed the crowd, her voice full-throated with emotion as she told the story of the previous summer. It made us actually open our eyes even further—I mean, we knew, but we didn’t know, right?—to the need that we have to stand up as Richmond residents on the front line to Chevron, she shouted.
McLaughlin, now in the middle of her second term, had announced the day before that the city was suing Chevron to force the company to take extra safety measures. A round-faced woman with a treble voice that seemed to still carry a little of the tone acquired from schoolteacher jobs of her past, she told the crowd, The community doesn’t deserve to be traumatized.
And when McKibben took the mic, he expanded the geography of this story. Chevron is a really bad actor. OK?… Ask the people in Canada fighting their fracking. Ask the people in Ecuador who have had to live with their waste. When they get it here to refine it, they’re a bad actor.… And they are bad, bad actors on this planet. They have nine billion barrels of oil in their reserves. OK? If they burn most of those, then we cannot deal with climate change.
Afterward, at least 2,500 ralliers marched to the refinery. They painted a giant yellow sunflower on the street in front of the gates. Idle No More activists led them in a round dance, a lively circular performance of unity. Then, according to activists’ accounts, the protesters approached the cops, who rounded up those who trespassed, until there were no more plastic handcuffs and officers had to send for more. In the end, the police arrested more than two hundred people.
Doria did not participate in the march. She had mixed feelings about the out-of-towners. The city becomes an arena of battle, she reflected later, and there was a disconnect between the activists who march through the neighborhoods where the people who are actually hurting from all this stuff live and the residents who don’t even know what the hell is going on. But after the march, Urban Tilth held its own event, a fossil-fuel-free party on the Greenway where the out-of-towners and locals mixed and members of the community had a chance to talk about their experiences with the fire. This was the more significant part of the day for Doria, a moment when the loneliness of Richmond seemed to ebb away and people could feel their connections with one another. Her sense of mission had shifted over the past year: she felt she was no longer just growing food but fighting against a corporation for her own and her neighbors’ survival. And she realized this was no small battle: it was global. But it was critical, she thought, to empower the voices of people who had felt the hardest blows from fossil fuels and had the most at stake.
Shortly after the protest, Doria received an international invitation. Richmond’s oil-industry opposition had come to the attention of officials in Ecuador, where a group of Amazonian communities had sued over contamination left behind by the oil-drilling ventures of Texaco, a company acquired by Chevron in 2001. The incident was sometimes nicknamed Amazon Chernobyl. Texaco had spilled about sixteen billion gallons of toxic wastewater in the rain forest, according to the environmental group Amazon Watch. The company had filled hundreds of pits with a stew of petroleum wastes including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, carcinogens and by-products of combustion later also found in trace amounts in Richmond’s soils. According to one report commissioned by a human rights group in 1993—one year after Texaco ceased production in this region of Ecuador—residents near these polluted sites had a high risk of cancer, and people exposed directly to oil contamination experienced “elevated rates of fungal infection, dermatitis, headache, and nausea.” Communities in the region had been trying to get compensation from Texaco and then Chevron for two decades. In 2007, then president Rafael Correa had ridden into office with the support of Ecuador’s Indigenous communities. During his administration, Ecuador changed its constitution to recognize the rights of nature. Correa also entreated international governments to pay billions of dollars to protect the rain forest if the country would, in turn, agree to stop drilling for oil there. In 2011, an Ecuadoran court awarded $18 billion to the Amazonian plaintiffs, though the amount was eventually dropped to $9.5 billion. But the company refused to pay up and moved its assets out of the country. Employing a legal team that literally numbered in the hundreds, the company also sued the plaintiffs’ New York–based lawyer, Steven Donziger, for fraud and racketeering, and a Manhattan court scheduled hearings in that case in the fall of 2013.¶ After the Richmond protest made international news, Correa’s administration reached out to Mayor McLaughlin, offering to fund a visit in which she and other Richmonders could meet the people who lived beside the now-abandoned Amazonian oil-waste pits.
Correa’s relationship with progressives in both the United States and Latin America had already started to sour as his administration opened other Indigenous lands, including parts of a national park, to oil extraction. He would become an even more controversial figure for, among other things, using the legal system to harass and prosecute both Indigenous and environmental activists, and after he left office in 2017, he was found guilty on corruption charges. Arguably the trip may have been a publicity stunt for the Ecuadoran president. But McLaughlin’s intent was clearer. My main purpose was to see it for myself, come back, educate the community, build solidarity, McLaughlin said, years later, and she asked Doria Robinson to accompany her, along with a journalist from a regional newspaper. Over a week, they went to Quito to meet with Correa then took a flight to Lago Agrio to see the oil pits. Nearly everywhere McLaughlin was followed by television cameras and radio broadcasters. In the Amazon, the group had police escorts. The Ecuadoran officials staged a press conference at one of the now-defunct oil wells. Doria kept a blog, where she described the scene.
Many of the contaminated pits were covered with a thin layer of dirt by Chevron-Texaco before they left Ecuador as a remediation measure. This soil acts like a gelatin-like cover. When you step on it it feels like walking on a water-bed with small holes where water seeps through.…
Reporters milled around exploring the pit for themselves, stepping on its strange surface, commenting on the rank smell in the air, taking photographs and film footage.
In the late morning, Correa himself made a dramatic entrance—wearing blue jeans and yellow rubber boots, with the theme from Star Wars blaring behind him—and walked into the oil pit to announce a campaign named the Dirty Hand of Chevron, calling for a worldwide boycott against the company. After this spectacle, Mayor McLaughlin and two mayors of Amazonian towns walked together to the oil pit, dipped gloved fingers in, and held up their oil-coated hands for a somber photograph.
In the days that followed, the Richmond contingent heard stories from families in the region who had suffered from cancers or birth defects that they blamed on oil pollution, and McLaughlin vowed to build relationships with communities here and in other countries that had complaints against Chevron. For Doria, Ecuador felt like a House of Mirrors for visiting Richmond residents, she wrote in a blog entry. The resemblance to Richmond California’s economic and political landscape is uncanny. She pondered climate change often during the trip. Sometimes the overpowering scale of the problem would hit her—and the sheer size and economic might of the corporations that dominated the world’s oil, gas, and coal reserves. It’s difficult to preserve space for hope, she reflected.
Chevron later funded a billboard advertisement criticizing McLaughlin for this trip and others like it (such as to a sister city in Cuba). IF YOU SEE GAYLE MCLAUGHLIN, TELL HER TO CALL RICHMOND, one ad read in large lettering, and GAYLE MCLAUGHLIN: TRAVELING THE WORLD, IGNORING RICHMOND, read another, along with an unflattering image of her with a puckered face and a strangely disproportionate hand raised to her chin.
In 2014, I traveled to Richmond twice, in both spring and autumn. It was an election year for city officials, and the community was wrestling with questions about who and what it might become, its split personalities facing off. There was the old oil company town and the newer green face of the Left Coast. There was also an underlying socioeconomic clash—those who had rooted here for generations versus newcomers, some of whom represented new wealth and its influence on property values, the tendency of the rich to drive up the market and price out the poor. Various sides would claim they were more authentically Richmond, each insisting that it had the community’s best interests at heart. (Doria observed that there was also an older philosophical strain, one she could trace through her family and the civil rights movement—about lifting people up and mending community collectively—but this was rarely well represented in politics at any level.)
Politics, identity, and economy intersect in complex ways. Arguably, all identities have politics, and allegiance to a community or heritage can be radically empowering when the intent is to lift up people who have been marginalized. The phrase identity politics originated in the 1970s with a group of Black feminists who sought an approach to fighting oppression that was rooted in the needs of their community: “We believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come directly out of our own identity,” they wrote. In popular usage, the phrase sometimes morphs into a weapon, a pejorative wielded mostly against the Left. But Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza argues that the idea remains relevant to present-day racial justice movements: “Identity politics says that no longer should we be expected to fight against someone else’s oppression without fighting against our own.”
Identity is also about home, where you imagine you come from, where you choose to plant yourself, and what you will build in the space around you. But not all identities are a path to empowerment. And there are places where industries are themselves an identity. Sometimes the story looms as large as or larger than the economics. Coal country is more than a place; it is also a story about heritage. And it is, of course, normal to have pride in the things that you or your parents or grandparents have built in a place. But in a time when fossil fuel pollution puts everyone’s future at risk, it’s a trap to cling too fiercely to the industries of the past.
In the fossil fuel politics of Richmond, some residents felt Chevron was always the “other,” always a towering externality bearing down monstrously on their lives. But some, it seems, felt that the city and the refinery were inseparable siblings, or that the oil company was a justifiable, if messy, means to an end. Even after the 2012 disaster, a number of community leaders believed that the company’s money might be the only way to ameliorate the poverty found too commonly here and to pay for public needs—and simultaneously to fund salaries and campaigns. Scores of Richmond community service organizations have long been supported by Chevron philanthropy.
Chevron, meanwhile, had a specific agenda in Richmond that election season. For the past several years, the company had been pushing for approval of a plan to modernize the Richmond refinery—or to expand it, depending on which verb seemed more apt to one’s view of the situation. In 2008, a previous city council, more sympathetic to the company’s aims, had approved one version of Chevron’s modernization plan. (The councilors who voted in favor earned the epithet the Chevron Five for their consistent support of the company.) Then Communities for a Better Environment, the West County Toxics Coalition, and the Asian Pacific Environmental Network led a lawsuit against the city council over the plan, insisting that its environmental impacts hadn’t been rigorously studied. A judge halted the project in 2009. In 2014, the company was trying again with a scaled-back version. But one of the goals of both plans seemed obvious to those who analyzed it: to process high-sulfur crude, otherwise known as sour or dirty crude, a category that included fracked oil. Kamala Harris, then serving as the attorney general of California, wrote a ten-page letter criticizing the company’s plan. Dirty crude was more corrosive and more likely to create repeats of the 2012 fire and to increase the refinery’s carbon emissions. “Given that the residents of Richmond are already facing some of the highest pollution burdens in California,” Harris wrote, the city’s environmental impact review needed to “analyze whether additional pollution will contribute significantly to the community’s existing public health problems.”
In response, Chevron aggressively pleaded its case to Richmond’s citizens and tried to sway city politics. The company started its own news site called the Richmond Standard in January that year, and its consultants helped launch another “citizen journalist” venture, called Radio Free Richmond, a reference to the cold war–era radio programs broadcast by the United States to Soviet-occupied countries, perhaps playful or perhaps suggesting that Richmond needed liberating from the Left. Chevron also bought up most of the billboard space in the center of the city and ran a combination of feel-good public relations messages and ads for political candidates who supported its interests. During the year, the company also spent about $3 million on political campaigning aimed at trying to influence local elections in Richmond that November. Gayle McLaughlin had reached the end of her term limit, and Chevron hoped no one with similar anticorporate political positions would succeed her. The company backed a candidate named Nat Bates, who was serving on the city council. Peppered across town were billboards featuring Bates’s face, with the slogan BUILDING THE RICHMOND WE NEED, HONORING THE RICHMOND WE LOVE, and beneath, in smaller print, was a list of ad sponsors, including “Major Funding by Chevron.”
One morning, I drove to the Richmond Civic Center to talk with Bates at his office. The Civic Center is Richmond’s city hall and also a community gathering space, an arts center, a plaza, a modernist collection of brick buildings designed in the 1940s to project the image of an industrial city on the rise. I parked nearby and walked past a senior center. On one curved wall of this building was a florid, intricate mural depicting various chapters of Richmond’s history—including one of the original Rosie the Riveter workers, the oldest national park ranger in the country, and the Japanese gardeners who had run a series of commercial rose nurseries in Richmond in the early twentieth century. The last panel featured Doria Robinson, larger-than-life yet unpretentious, even when essentialized as art—one eyebrow slightly arched, wearing a wry smile. Behind her, a crew of Tilthers, and in the background, crop rows of flowers and greenery; at the far horizon, the refinery; and to the west, an assembly of activists with protest signs bearing messages like CLEAN UP CHEVRON.
“We will show Standard Oil’s refineries transform into solar plants and green industry,” the artist wrote in a statement describing the mural. The city council had funded the artwork, but Nat Bates had cast an opposing vote. This was not his vision of Richmond.
He had also recently fulminated against the bicycle infrastructure Doria and her partner, Najari, had helped push the city to install. Bates insisted that cyclists were almost nonexistent in Richmond and that bike lanes were “popping up all over” and “creating all kind of havoc.” (Najari argued the opposite, that many people who couldn’t afford cars needed to ride safely, and later that day, when I was walking downtown, two young men traveled past me on bikes, one on the sidewalk trying awkwardly to balance on a too-small frame, the other in the street. The second saw my camera and stopped to ask if I was a reporter and if something was going on in the city.)
But Nat Bates and Doria Robinson had grown from the same roots. He belonged to her grandparents’ generation. From a southern migrant family, Bates was raised by a single mom who brought him to Richmond from Texas and who got a job with the Santa Fe Railroad in the 1940s. In the 1950s, he’d had a brief career as a professional baseball player in Canada for two seasons. Then, back in Richmond, he was a probation officer for thirty-five years. In 1967, he became one of the first Black leaders elected to Richmond’s city council. He had already served two terms as mayor in the 1970s. Recently, he had been invited to the White House, and some of his campaign ads featured a picture of him standing beside President Barack Obama.
Then in his eighties, he was known as a local gadfly, especially to his opponents on the city council. He was sometimes caricatured, accused of being “in Chevron’s pocket,” and in turn, he was often provocative toward his opponents, accusing them of holding a radical agenda.
I also recognized his innate charisma and charm. He greeted me in the hallway with a handshake and led me to his office, where I sat across from him at his desk. He had large weathered hands and a small well-groomed mustache and wore a shiny silver and gold watch and chunky rectangular glasses. A prescription bottle protruded from his pocket. He spoke in a soft, warm drawl and was unabashed about his support of Chevron. In his view, it was simply part of an economic reality.
Did he have any concerns about Richmond being so reliant on the revenue of one company, I asked? “Well, in life, you play with the cards they dealt you, right?” he said, as if I had asked a philosophical question instead of an economic one. “I guarantee you there are a lot of cities that would love, just love to have Chevron USA in their city,” he said. He called the fire “troublesome,” but insisted that the city should do whatever it could to move the modernization plan forward and get the refinery running at full capacity again, “get all those jobs back online.” But he favored any flavor of economic development: he envisioned Richmond becoming a hub for importing electric cars and said he was happy to see a solar panel company at the waterfront.
When I asked about climate change, Bates demurred: he repeated the arguments that have been fabricated by climate disinformation groups. “When you have two or three or four different scientists come forward with different opinions about the necessity, and the effects of fossil fuels and climate control and a host of other scientific issues, obviously, we have to try to … arrive at a decision that, hopefully is in the best interests of the community,” he said. I couldn’t tell whether he was cagey or truly misinformed—practically speaking, there is a wildly strong consensus among scientists. A moment later he walked back his position and acknowledged that the Obama administration had pledged to tackle climate change, and he wanted to be supportive.
Critics of Bates have raised questions about the legality of his connections to Chevron and the political action committees that have supported his campaigns. Perhaps Bates’s enthusiasm for Chevron was purely self-interest. But in the moment, I assumed that he was sincere and that he could not imagine a desirable reality in which the refinery was not central to the city’s functioning and identity. In a stump speech, Bates later insisted that anyone who didn’t accept Chevron’s support was “a damn fool.”
And Bates wasn’t entirely wrong: the city couldn’t yet afford to lose Chevron’s business.
A few days later, I stopped by a job-training program called RichmondBUILD. Both Gayle McLaughlin and Nat Bates had touted RichmondBUILD as a city accomplishment—McLaughlin because it trained for green jobs, including solar installation and the gritty work of cleaning up old industrial sites; Bates because any kind of job creation was a net positive in his estimate.
The program was held inside a stucco yellow building about a block from the railroad tracks. Inside, on a concrete floor, the students were completing a series of physical agility tests—crawling into a confined space, scaling up tall ladders, hauling weighty buckets—to prove they could handle such labor. The program manager, Fred Lucero, was a pragmatist. Green jobs, he told me, were fine; they made for a good story. But anyone who came from intergenerational poverty in Richmond just needed to work. “I emphasize going to work,” Lucero told me. “We serve a population that is tough, that’s been through a lot.”
I pulled three students aside and asked about their aspirations—one wanted to be a carpenter, one a park ranger or any other sort of green job. And the third said she hoped to work at the refinery. Her name was Breonna, and she had a tattoo on one arm shaped like an infinity symbol, with the words LOVE THE LIFE YOU LIVE. LIVE THE LIFE YOU LOVE. She hadn’t liked her previous job at Walmart. “That’s not for me,” she said. I asked if she worried that a fire or accident might strike the plant again. “Personally, I think fear is a choice in life,” she told me. “I just stay positive.”
There were plenty of others in this town who had made a similar choice, people who needed to play the cards they were dealt.
But in the long term, it was hard to see how this community, or any community, would survive if we all continued to tether our future, our choices, our energy, our economy, our homes, to such an industry. “This image that Nat Bates keeps about Richmond,” Doria told me later, “it’s not a healthy one. This corporation throws money from time to time, and everybody has to run and catch it.” But she also respected Bates’s lifetime contributions to the city. “There’s this huge danger in throwing away the people who fought hard for justice, who came before us, because the justice they were fighting for doesn’t look like the justice we’re fighting for today.” Doria thought Bates had failed to understand the root causes of the community’s suffering. (Nat Bates and Doria Robinson would never see eye to eye politically, but a few years later, he would drop by one of Urban Tilth’s farms to observe their work and offer to make some calls to find a person who could loan them some heavy machinery.)
In July 2014, the Richmond city council voted to approve Chevron’s modernization plan. No one opposed but the mayor and vice-mayor abstained, protesting that they had not discussed the details thoroughly. Doria’s mother attended and gave an interview to a small newspaper run by a Richmond teacher and his students. I’ve been in Richmond almost sixty years, she told the reporter. This company does not care about this community.
Chevron continued its public relations blitz, called Richmond Proud, through Election Day. The campaign won awards from the PR industry. But it also backfired, provoking the ire and ridicule of national media. David Horsey, a cartoonist and editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times, wrote that the company deserved “this year’s top prize for brazen conduct.”
Senator Bernie Sanders stopped in Richmond to a give a speech. You’re seeing right here, in this small city, unlimited sums of money from one of the largest corporations in America, who says, “How dare you ordinary people—working class people, people of color, young people—how dare you think you have the right to run your city government?” he homilized to an audience of several hundred, who rewarded him with a standing ovation.
In November, every candidate Chevron had thrown its weight behind lost their bid. Nat Bates’s opponent won by a landslide. Bates would eventually return to a seat on the city council. But it was clear that the oil industry couldn’t reliably buy an election here—not even with an outpouring of money and advertising—and a large number of Richmond voters no longer wanted their home to be a company town. They had made a different choice.
No matter what happened in the political landscape, for Urban Tilth it was always necessary to reckon with the dirt.
Dirt is an ecosystem. Peer through a microscope, and soil can be a forest of half-composed stems and leaves with filigreed veins, shiny mites and little bugs, worms and their glistening trails, netted root hairs, strands and filaments of fungi, and various microbes and molds, a furious mix of rot and rebirth. Soil is also a kind of historical record—it hangs on to waste and files it into layers of accumulated dust and particles. Soil recalls the things that happened on its surface. In some kinds of soil layers you can find the char of millennia-old fires or volcanic events. Soil can also be forgiving: in experiments around the world, fungi and microbes have sometimes been able to munch through toxic substances and break them down, even clear away some residues of oil spills.
In the past, Urban Tilth had relied on new soil with no memory, manufactured by nurseries, donated and hauled to its gardens. But before the 2012 accident, at the middle school up on the hill, the young farming apprentices had planted directly into the earth. And in the long run, it would be hard to grow a lot of food in Richmond if the soil always needed replacing and importing. The question remained: Could the soil endemic to Richmond ever be safe enough?
There’s never been a lot of study on what happens to plants and dirt just after industrial accidents. But there were reasons to worry about the soils in Richmond. More than a decade earlier, for instance, after an industrial fire at a warehouse, some British scientists had detected alarming levels of PAHs, the same class of chemicals found in the Ecuadoran oil pits. The scientists determined that the level of PAHs was 70 times higher than normal in grass shoots and 370 times higher in soil.
Joshua (Josh) Arnold, a soil science student at the University of California, Berkeley, had just moved to Richmond at the time of the refinery fire. I remember just being absolutely astounded that there was a refinery there! I thought I was moving to the Bay Area that’s super environmentally friendly. Two years later, Josh, who had just graduated, and two others, an organic gardening teacher and a Ph.D. student in soil science, offered to help other Richmonders test the soil. They recruited people from all over the city to volunteer their yards and dug samples from nineteen spots in Richmond. They sent bags of dirt away to labs, searching for trace amounts of carcinogens like xylene, benzene, and toluene, found in crude oil—and PAHs. Although these are common contaminants, it is surprisingly difficult to find any standardized safety rules specifically for residential soils. There’s no straightforward consensus about what concentration of these chemicals the average row of backyard tomatoes or roses can hold or what might still be safe if, say, a child eats some dirt or a dog tracks garden mud through the living room. So the students cobbled together a list of health guidelines from a motley range of sources. When the results came back, they found few things of great concern—traces of hydrocarbons and xylene. The students recommended earthworms and compost as an antidote to any lingering contamination. And at the middle school farm, the Tilthers aggressively layered on compost and cover crops and followed the guidelines offered by the soil science students until Doria felt safe to let teens plant vegetables there again.
This act of soil renewal prepared Urban Tilth for a far more ambitious project to reclaim abandoned land at the edge of the city.
Richmond sits at the northwest tip of Contra Costa County, which curves east along the Suisun Bay and south, behind Oakland and Berkeley—a mishmash of agriculture and industry. To the north lies a community outside city limits called North Richmond, a former agricultural outpost for Italian, Mexican, and Asian immigrants that, in the 1940s, evolved into a blue-collar community for Black industrial workers. It is somewhere between urban and rural, like a place that has fallen off the map. Muddy with a tendency to flood, crowded, shunted into the far, neglected corner of Richmond’s urban consciousness, in the 2010s the community of about four thousand remained “underserved”—with high crime rates and poverty and not a lot of help from government entities—and consequently its residents were sometimes full of distrust. Garbage dumps and recycling centers, storage lots, homeless encampments, and run-down convenience stores were splotched through the area, along with an elementary school and residential houses that were too often aging and cramped.
The area was also riddled with vacant lots, and the supervisor of Contra Costa County had recently become an enthusiast of urban farming. He asked his staff to sniff out some property that might still be suitable for growing food, then chose Urban Tilth to develop a three-acre plot of land between two creeks. The organization would rent the land for the nominal fee of $500 per year. The property, three miles north of the refinery, was tiny compared to an industrial farm, but it would be large enough to demonstrate what could be possible and to allow people’s imaginations to unfurl.
The chosen land parcel spread northeast from an intersection of Fred Jackson Way (named after a local civil rights activist). It lay in a historic Japanese flower-growing district; some descendants of those growers still owned the property next door and rented greenhouses to an orchid cultivator and a wholesale seedling nursery. Numerous Indigenous Huchiun Ohlone villages had stood near and around the land long before North Richmond was settled by migrants from elsewhere. A local association of Black cowboys had run horses there. But industry had never touched it, and the first soil tests came back clean.
It took two years for the Tilthers to negotiate with the county—to rezone the land, get permits, and draw up a lease.
When Doria first laid eyes on the place, it was a jungle of weeds higher than her head, in some spots twice as high, with a few trees scattered within them, and some weeping willows slumped by the street like long-haired old men.
Urban Tilth mowed the weeds down. But by the time the lease was approved, they had grown back, especially the blackberries.
Much of the coastal West suffers from an infestation of an especially aggressive variety of blackberry from Eurasia. (It’s rumored that the famed botanist Luther Burbank first planted them on American soil, and from there, the thorny fruits went rogue.) While the berries are tasty, the canes sometimes grow into a colossal tangle—a Medusa with barbed tentacles sharp as knives, capable of grabbing and shredding clothing and skin.
The thicket of thorns at the farm site was roughly the size of eight basketball courts lined end to end, surrounded by other dense weeds, including enormous, fragrant, stubborn-rooted fennel. The land hadn’t been fenced for four decades, and as the Tilthers explored further, they discovered it had also been an informal dump and was piled with hidden trash.
Yet Doria’s optimism was unscathed. She could see it already, a vision in the weeds—the rows of vegetables, an educational center. My eyes are permanently rose covered. I’m like, oh, man, this is the best farm ever. By the time they began clearing the land, she and Tania Pulido had already assembled a group of local residents to help them in this seemingly quixotic process—and their dream for the site grew more elaborate—a farm stand, an amphitheater, perhaps even a café. We just had no idea what the heck we were jumping into, Tania said afterward.
The land itself was a cantankerous thing. First, the Tilthers rented a team of goats to chomp down the weeds. But the goats looked at that blackberry patch, and they’re like, oh, no. You will have to deal with that, Doria said. Then they brought in large mechanized equipment—toothy mowers and mulchers, grinders and bulldozers. Underneath the weeds, they found orphaned couches, chimneys, chunks of broken asphalt, used motor oil, several discarded wallets including credit cards, rusty barbed wire, old tires. Urban Tilth hired workers from several local organizations, including a program that worked with women who were recently released from prison and eager to gain new skills. With hands and machines, these crews dragged dozens of semitrailer truckloads from the site.
But the land was like a geologic formation of waste, strata full of trash layered like fossils in rock. We went through a process of realizing that everything we were standing on was also dumped material, Doria remembered. With the machines, they scraped the ground surface, then walked behind and scooped up more debris by hand. We would literally just clear a few feet at a time, trying to get all the stuff out.
The Berkeley soil science students came to the farm to run a more detailed search for contamination. They drew a grid over the entire lot; then Urban Tilth’s summer apprentices retrieved soil samples from each square of the grid. The soil was so hard that the kids had to use pickaxes in some places to extract the earth. The results came back from two different labs: there were dregs and residues of asphalt and one spot of lead, all in small amounts. The ground was also nearly devoid of life or nutrients—it was mostly crushed rock and clay. But the situation could be handled as before—with compost and earthworms and bugs.
We need to put back a ton of organic materials, Doria thought. We just need all kinds of rot to be happening throughout the site. Truckloads of manure arrived on the land, forty cubic yards of compost every week, donated by the same company that was contracted to handle city organic waste, along with straw—spread and raked and spread again. Over and over for months, dumping manure, turning manure, planting cover crops of buckwheat and daikon radish. Turning the soil again. Rot and renewal.
In the fall of 2016, while this process was still underway, Doria and the Tilthers decided to plant what they could. At first, they had to bring in soil and more compost to create a series of mounded rows, arranged in a circle, where they grew mustard greens, collard greens, garlic, Swiss chard, cabbage, broccoli, and cilantro.
The next year they plotted an orchard on the northwest edge and sectioned it off, ten-foot-by-ten-foot squares, each a home for a tree. About 350 volunteers showed up and laid down more layers of manure, straw, and compost. And in each square, they placed a bare-root whip, a little stick that would become an apricot, peach, persimmon, pear, or apple tree. Over the next year, the vast majority of the trees survived. Within a couple years, they were bearing fruit that was sent to members of Urban Tilth’s farm share program.
About a year later, the Tilthers could finally begin planting in crop rows, in soil they were building there on the farm.
The first greenhouses went up.
It was the un-wasting of land, the reimagining of place.
It was also an act of rebellion. No one would tell the Tilthers what was and was not possible on an old, broken bit of ground.
The next couple of years brought a series of troubling events. In 2017, officially, the seven-year California drought ended, which should have been a good sign, but stretches of dangerously arid, scorching conditions recurred—and scientists predicted such droughts would become ever worse, ever more intense, ever longer in duration as the state headed further into the twenty-first century. Around Labor Day that year, the San Francisco Bay Area clocked its highest-ever temperature record, 106 degrees, as a heat wave rolled into the region. The following year, heat waves seared Southern California. The heat was most dangerous, always, in places with too much concrete, too few trees, too many diesel fumes, and too much poverty, as in the Iron Triangle and in parts of Los Angeles.
In May 2018, the city of Richmond reached a settlement with Chevron—the company would pay $5 million in damages for the 2012 fire. Many locals said it was not enough. By comparison, Chevron’s CEO, Michael Wirth, earned a $21 million salary that year. Meanwhile, the Richmond refinery continued to send up flares—on New Year’s Eve 2017, in February 2018, in April after a pair of steam boilers malfunctioned, in June as a result of an “upset” in a process unit, said a Chevron spokesperson. The company insisted the flares were routine. Local activists said they were pollution—“episodic exposures … that may cause lung disease, cancer and other health problems,” read a report by a scientist from Communities for a Better Environment.
In October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that the world’s carbon emissions would need to start declining sharply within the next dozen years or sooner to avoid crossing troubling thresholds. The crisis was already here, the scientists acknowledged, and some of its consequences were unavoidable. The global average temperature would keep warming for at least twenty to thirty years, and the seas were now inevitably going to rise for centuries to come (as Andrea Dutton, with her colorful scarf, had told people in St. Augustine). But every impact could become far worse if these emissions weren’t curbed quickly.
A pair of earth scientists announced that parts of the San Francisco Bay were sinking as the drought led people to pump out more groundwater, the land dropping down and the water rising up. That summer, the Richmond city council voted to declare “a Climate Emergency that threatens our city, region, state, nation, civilization, humanity, and the natural world.”
In North Richmond, a team of architects studied flood control. An old stormwater pump station was failing, and the designers, the county, and a local watershed organization wanted to build a levee that would also function as a marsh, a type of strategy called green engineering, to control flooding now and in the future. But how well such projects would work is always a function of how much the rest of the world might do to reduce carbon emissions.
And 2018 was the first moment that I heard Doria Robinson’s optimism waver.
“I’m not gonna kill myself tomorrow, you know. I have two kids in the world,” she blurted in a phone call that summer.
She said she worried for her kids. Her daughter had a running cynical joke: When I’m your age, I’m going to be living in a refugee camp.
“I know we can’t prevent the damage that we’ve already set up,” she said more slowly, reaching for each word. “But I feel committed to just doing everything in my power to set up as many things as possible to make the impact less painful.”
There were larger forces at work in the world that Doria had no immediate control over.
California has some of the strongest climate-change regulations in the nation. But from the beginning, they contained loopholes for the oil industry, including Chevron. The people who had the most power to deal with the problem of climate change—people with money, people with political clout—rarely spoke to those struggling in a place like Richmond, even though a community like this would always bear the brunt of failures.
Economists are often most interested in a set of high-level mechanisms—trying to push carbon emissions downward through taxes or fees or tradable permits, creating a market in which it costs money to pollute, a disincentive. The European Union has a carbon market. The eleven U.S. states that belong to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative on the East Coast use market-based regulations to force emissions cuts from power plants. Such policies can produce results, but some experts say they could also fail in the long term if they don’t target the oil and gas industry directly. They won’t work if they leave places like Richmond stranded or allow fossil fuel companies to delay the inevitable—a transition to other forms of energy that won’t damage the atmosphere.
Moreover, a refinery or a coal plant exists in a place. And as such a facility reduces its carbon output, it also generally gasps out fewer toxic chemicals, which spares the lungs and throats of people living nearby. Many environmental justice activists feel that if the world is going to clean up fossil fuels and usher in a shiny green economy, the promise of this should come to the people who have suffered all of the years of fires and asthma and fear. This should not be a world where only the rich can breathe.
One of California’s cornerstone climate laws, launched in 2013, established a cap-and-trade program that relies on tradable permits to emit carbon. The permits create a market—you can buy the right to pollute. Year after year, the number of permits decreases, the cap tightens, and carbon emissions are therefore supposed to decline. The state combines this program with other policies that promote renewable energy, clean cars, and green buildings, and by some measures, these efforts have helped. The state’s emissions have declined, and California beat its 2020 goals for cutting carbon. But many experts say the Golden State will have more trouble trimming its emissions in the next decade: the state needs to invest more in clean cars, say some, and it needs to get tougher on refineries, say others.
According to an investigation by ProPublica, oil industry emissions actually increased in California after the cap-and-trade program began, and companies had even banked some of their permits so that they could pollute more in later years when the restrictions became tougher. In 2017, when the law was reapproved, the state gave away millions of free carbon permits to the oil industry, more than the companies needed. Environmental justice groups like Communities for a Better Environment tried to pressure the state to place a cap on refinery emissions at existing pollution levels, so that at least the problem couldn’t worsen. But the state refused. It appeared that the free riders were continuing to mooch off the public.
In the fall of 2018, the governor of California held a conference in San Francisco with representatives from all over the world and from the United Nations, a West Coast climate-change meeting at a time when Washington, DC, was denying not only the urgency but the existence of the crisis. Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire erstwhile mayor of New York City, was interrupted during his keynote address by a group of a protesters shouting, Mother Earth is not for sale! He scoffed at them, Only in America could you have environmentalists protesting an environmental conference. But the activists didn’t trust billionaires like Bloomberg and were afraid of more of the same, more free rides for industry, more suffering for communities that were already bearing the highest burdens.
Outside on the streets, it wasn’t a joke. That Saturday, thirty thousand people marched through San Francisco—banging drums, playing instruments, cheering, chanting, carrying signs and banners. They had come from everywhere, including people from other communities at the edges of oil and gas extraction or production, traveling long distances—such as from the Ecuadoran Amazon, Canada, and Nigeria. They also held a nearly weeklong series of events, including a summit where they traded ideas and shared expertise, played music, and made art. Doria and some of her staff at Urban Tilth and their friends and allies had spent months organizing their own response. Two hundred people visited the North Richmond Farm.
Afterward, the Tilthers felt somehow larger and more powerful than they had before. It definitely made a huge impact on everyone, Doria said. We needed to make it clear that you can be unafraid; you can have a voice.
I had made plans to visit the Bay Area in April 2020. But in January and February the world went askew, and by March, cases of Covid were exploding across the country. I abruptly canceled my trip and stayed in my house in Seattle. We are scrambling to reorganize so we can keep everyone employed through this crisis, Doria wrote me in mid-March. She had sent some staff home on paid leave, even though it strained the organization’s budget, and let a few stay on the farm, as long as they kept away from each other. On March 17, the Bay Area began a shelter-in-place order. But food enterprises, including Urban Tilth, were allowed to keep operating.
As with most other catastrophes—from a refinery explosion to a worldwide climate crisis—there is nothing good that can be said about the worst global public health disaster in a century. There is no platitude you can offer to turn the senselessness of the millions of lives lost into a lesson in grace. But when tragedy reshapes the world, the upheaval can sometimes throw certain details into relief. Like turning up soil with a shovel, you can see things that were buried before.
At the same time the pandemic began, a staff member named Rudy—hired just out of high school five years previously—passed away suddenly, not of Covid but from other causes.
His friends and colleagues at the farms and gardens reeled with grief and were overwhelmed, but they put themselves into the work of growing. In this particular crisis and city, the demand for food—especially fresh, affordable food—soared. To Doria it felt like a scramble for survival. If we hadn’t pushed so hard, we’d have just been out, like Covid would’ve just knocked us out. Because we insisted that we were going to make an impact, that’s why we had enough infrastructure, Doria said. She worked almost constantly. Adam Boisvert, who had joined Urban Tilth full-time the year before, started working at the North Richmond Farm almost daily—in between teaching an urban agriculture class at Richmond High. The Tilthers mounded up and planted twenty-five new crop rows in two months—a project that was originally supposed to take them two more years. (At the ends of some of the rows, they placed empty bottles of kombucha. Rudy used to drink kombucha prodigiously and absentmindedly leave the empties in the field, so the bottles here served as a memorial.)
Big green crates of food from Urban Tilth’s community-supported agriculture program circulated through Richmond—citrus, greens, broccoli, tomatoes, whatever could be plucked from the vine or the ground at that moment in the season. Some of the produce came from the Tilth farms and some from a group of other farms in the region that had formed partnerships with the organization. At the beginning of April, about 80 families were ordering a weekly box of fruits and vegetables from Urban Tilth on a sliding scale from $10 up (with a larger amount subsidizing boxes for those in need); by the end of the month, it was about 250 families. They gave away 200 more to people who couldn’t afford to pay. By the end of 2020, Urban Tilth had distributed more than sixty thousand pounds of produce.
At the same time, the human world quieted. Fewer cars traversed the labyrinth of highways that crisscrossed California. The air above the San Francisco Bay became measurably clearer. And in late April the price of crude oil plummeted until it was less than worthless, valued at negative $37 a barrel.
Some things rise in an emergency, and others fall.
By the summer, investigative journalist Antonia Juhasz was projecting the end of oil. “Demand has cratered, prices have collapsed, and profits are shrinking. The oil majors (giant global corporations including BP, Chevron, and Shell) are taking billions of dollars in losses while cutting tens of thousands of jobs,” she wrote in a sweeping analysis in Sierra magazine. “It is clear that the oil industry will not recover from Covid-19 and return to its former self. What form it ultimately takes, or whether it will even survive, is now very much an open question.”**
Years ago, Richmond’s environmental justice activists used to say they merely wanted Chevron to clean up. But in the summer of 2020, the pandemic gave them permission to express radical desires.
Shut The Muthas Down! Andres Soto, longtime organizer with Communities for a Better Environment and radio host in Richmond, wrote on Facebook in July. His organization had released a report, authored by a longtime California oil industry researcher, called Decommissioning California Refineries, a 124-page treatise including diagrams and illustrations and discussions of how a refinery operates. “Machines that burn oil are going away,” the report read. Refineries emitted more carbon than any other single sector in the entire state. There was simply no way for California to do anything useful about climate change if it didn’t begin to shut down some of its oil refineries. “Early action to decommission refining capacity is a critical component of the least-impact, most socially just, most feasible paths to climate stabilization in California.… When should the decommissioning start? Right away.”
In all the years that the world had been talking about climate change, few people had dared to ask: What would it in fact mean to entirely shut down fossil fuels, not in the abstract, but here, now, at home?
In late July, the oil and gas company Marathon abruptly announced it was closing an oil refinery in Martinez, a city just thirteen miles northeast of Richmond, and a second in New Mexico, and laying off most of the workers at both sites. “We will indefinitely idle these facilities with no plans to restart normal operations,” the company explained in an official statement. In August, Phillips 66 said its refinery in Rodeo, eight miles north of Richmond, would no longer process oil but biofuels.
The news shuddered through the region. Machines that burned and refined oil were going away. But the transition process would be full of upheaval and uncertainty.
The summer of 2020 was a season of exhilaration and terror and outrage.
The pandemic hit Richmond hard. Covid was worse in communities that breathed too much air pollution, where people worked frontline jobs, where multigenerational families lived together, and in communities of color. In Richmond, all of these factors merged. That summer, Doria lost two aunts and an uncle to Covid. Others in Urban Tilth mourned family members. There has been so much dying. It’s hurting my soul, Doria wrote on Facebook.
In June, Richmond organized its own protests to mark the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis—including a guerrilla-art mass demonstration that created a Black Lives Matter mural, painted in yellow on the street in front of the Civic Center. A week later, Najari, Doria, and a group of artists co-organized a second mural-painting on Macdonald Avenue, a main thoroughfare chosen partly for its symbolism: it had been the site of a Ku Klux Klan march in the 1920s. The event was also a call for police reform: Doria drafted a series of demands to the city, including a “change to a culture that values Black Lives” and a reallocation of funding so that policing would focus on stopping and solving violent crimes. She also handled food. Activists held banners on either end of a two-block stretch to shut down traffic. There were several dozen painters and about two hundred people in attendance overall. Gayle McLaughlin showed up to help, stooping over the pavement with her bicycle helmet on, a mask on her face, and a paint roller in one hand. At the end, the yellow paint on the street read: REPARATIONS NOW.
Late in the season, Doria and I felt we could still meet safely if we kept our distance and spoke outdoors. I made a plan to drive down the coast and visit the Urban Tilth farms in early September, but when the date arrived, everything had gone up in flames—wildfire on the interstate, wildfire on the Pacific Coast Highway, and a cloud of toxic particulates enshrouding the West. The smoke colored the sky above the San Francisco Bay burnt orange for an entire day—the hue of molten glass, smoldering embers, rusted iron. The smoke blotted out the sun and turned everything around the region as cold as January, wool-sock weather.
Everything felt deadly, as if we’d been caught between walls made of smoke.
When I called Doria again, all we could do was laugh, the visceral laughter that comes when something is so intolerable that it must also be absurd. We said that we could try again the following month, barring a “zombie outbreak.”
It was almost Halloween before I could make my way there.
I showed up on a Saturday in late October. It was a California autumn day that began with fog and birdsong and one of the first rainfalls of the season. A collection of just over a dozen people had come to help relocate a greenhouse. About half of them worked for Urban Tilth. I recognized Adam instantly, even behind his face mask, and he gave me an air fist bump, our knuckles not quite making contact. Of the volunteers, a pair of women lived nearby, one had driven all the way from San Francisco, and a special ed teacher had come from Oakland. A woman named Tania (no relation to Tania Pulido), a farm manager-in-training, balanced a cheerful baby wearing a fuzzy hoodie with gray bear-ears sewn on. She told me her father had helped drive one of the machines used to clear the site a few years ago.
The farm itself was unrecognizable as the place I had seen a few years previously. A double-wide construction trailer at the front served as an office space. Beside it was a colorful sign that explained Urban Tilth’s plans for the place. A VISION FOR A HEALTHY NORTH RICHMOND! it read in cheerful green lettering. Behind it a giant rainwater cistern, a green lawn with a few picnic tables, and then a wide flat rectangular area where the rows of crops had been multiplying all year long. In the rows were sunflowers. Trellises heavy with tall but mostly spent heirloom tomatoes with deep purply red skin. Kale, chard, marigolds, mustards, everything lavishly green from the California weather. Roosters strutted in a coop along the eastern edge, singing cacophonously. (All of these birds were castoffs, strays that people had dumped on the property. Retired fighting cocks, maybe, or just nuisance birds. But Urban Tilth had taken them in.)
At the front of the farm, the Tilthers had put in a wash station—a shelter with pallets and water hoses where they could clean the dirt from the crops. They were now packing more than four hundred boxes of produce and giving away fruits and vegetables to more than a hundred other families at free farm stands every week.
A mix of pop, hip-hop, R&B, and some Janet Jackson thumped on a large boom box that looked like a power tool—bright yellow with rubberized bumpers at the edges—as half the crew set to unscrewing the supports that held up the greenhouse—a tentlike, half-cylindrical structure, with a metal spine and plastic covering—and the other half took a set of heavy-duty rakes to the new location to level the ground. As they worked with their hands, they discussed topics like the virtues of watermelon radishes and how to teach kids about science and photography. It was a barn raising of sorts.
Doria showed up later in the morning and rushed me over to the “chicken mansion”—a henhouse at the back, recently built, made of reclaimed redwood with a wide porch so that it looked more like an artist’s cottage but occupied by actual hens. She slid the door open and greeted the birds—“Hi, ladies”—who clucked at her agreeably.
Behind the henhouse stood a semicircular bench made of cob—an earthen mix of clay and straw, with a large brown glass jug of kombucha set on the top of it like an ornament. Beside it, a few pots of flowering currant. They were putting in a small medicinal garden here, Doria said, a symbol of healing in a time of loss.
I spent a week taking in Richmond.
It felt like a different place than the one I had first visited a decade previously. Less emptiness, more occupation, more people at home in the open space of the city.
I borrowed a bicycle from Najari’s shop, Rich City Rides, and pedaled down the Greenway path through downtown. I passed a long series of murals, many vivid with scenes of nature—a pair of Black women bird-watchers, a tree with the word HONOR painted above it, waves of water and sunflowers and the phrase WE CAN STOP CLIMATE CHAOS. Between all of these, unofficial street art and murals. Some were tags, others elaborately painted and expressive. One with a woman’s face with tears on her cheeks. One read, ENJOY MY RICHMOND.
The Richmond Greenway—which had been largely bare on my first visit—was now a series of parks, one after another. A central plaza with a pavilion and picnic tables, a playground, a basketball court, some plantings of native vegetation, a few sculptures, an orchard where any passerby could pick. I noticed a few new apple blossoms breaking open.
Beyond this, a local group had built a dirt-bike park with berms mounded into tracks and jumps. I passed parents watching their giggling children spin bikes through the paths. I passed dog walkers and joggers. Rusted corrugated warehouses with metal grates on the windows. Weeds blooming along the railroad tracks. The smell of flowers. The smell of urine. The smell of diesel. I rode to the end of the Greenway trail and the roaring parkway, not far from the refinery gates, then beyond. Across the railroad tracks from Chevron was a mural with the word UNITY in a geometric design of purple, orange, and green.
A couple of miles beyond that, a solar company had opened a sixty-acre farm covered in photovoltaic panels on cleaned-up industrial land leased from the oil giant. The panels turned their glinting faces to the sky—they were almost blinding.
I rode on until I reached a weedy meadow full of tents and trailers occupied by the houseless. Then a street full of semitrailer trucks. I rode until the pavement was broken, and it was clear I had reached a place no longer intended for humans and bicycles.
On my last day, I had a long conversation with Doria on the back deck of her house. She had been working sixteen-hour days and seemed overwhelmed, as if she were trying singlehandedly to hold this place back from the edge of another disaster.
But that morning we carved out a space in her backyard, apart from the commotion. We sat at a table beside pots of basil and rosemary. Her two Australian shepherd dogs, one dark brown and named Happy, one sandy-red and named Mocha, tussled enthusiastically on the lawn. Behind us stood a trapeze that her daughter had used for aerial acrobatics and the weathered wooden frame of what used to be the twins’ playhouse. Crows rasped behind us. A train whistle wailed.
She sat with her hands in her pockets, wearing a knit hat the color of buttercups, and told me of her dreams for her hometown. She and Najari and some other local activists had started another initiative in Richmond to support new worker-owned cooperatives. This effort included a small-business loan fund—financed partly by a national network that underwrites community-based business and partly with money from various other foundations. The loan fund was helping a series of small Richmond-based entrepreneurial efforts get off the ground, including a mobile food truck and catering business, a company devoted to DJing and music, a landscaping business, and a laundromat. And possibly a new grocery store in North Richmond—to be built by an affordable housing developer where Tania Pulido now worked. Eventually, the activists’ goal was also to focus on businesses that would more directly help with the transition away from oil—such as community solar and electric vehicles.
In the backdrop of this effort, the potential for calamity still loomed. The North Richmond Farm now had its own air monitors, so that Urban Tilth could detect a spike in contaminants. Doria knew there would be another fire. There would be another setback. “That’s the hazard of living here. We may have to cease operations, like we did before, for a long period of time, but this time, we’re going to have data,” she said. “We can hold them accountable.”
When the sun broke through the fog, she rolled out a turquoise umbrella that covered a wide wooden table. The morning waned.
I asked Doria if she ever felt disheartened.
“I just know it’s going to get worse before it gets better, and I’m trying to figure out how to survive.” There was a voice of urgency in her mind, driving her ceaselessly on. “Like you better try to look further into the future and put things in place. The storm’s gonna hit, girl. You better get your shit together,” she said. “I just keep trying to figure out how to do it more sanely, you know, so I don’t end up dying. Like, I don’t want to get cancer or diabetes or all these other things like stress and dysfunction.
“We try, we try, we try. And there’s definitely things that are better than not having anything, but it just feels like, I don’t know, spitting on a wildfire.
“And it’s not true, because there’s a lot of impact. It’s just the scale that we need is just so much bigger.”
It was always too much. It was never enough.
Like always, the city stood at the edge of promise and peril.
That same week, an eight-thousand-gallon tanker truck caught fire on the interstate in Richmond, the highway closed, and part of the city was told to shelter in place.
On November 2, 2020, the day before the election, the refinery flared because of a “power disruption” to part of the facility. Chevron issued a “level one” warning—claiming there would be no health impacts.
I wondered again, could you really dig into a place like Richmond? Could you really make a home on this tainted patch of earth and asphalt, in this moment of possibility and impossibility?
This is not separate from the question of surviving climate change.
It is easy to feel hopeless in the face of climate change, in the shadow of corporations with incomprehensibly large amounts of money and influence, in a moment of dizzying political instability and multiple overlapping crises.
But a time of unruliness is also a moment of rearrangement—there can be sudden shifts in who holds sway and what people value.
During 2021, community activists in Richmond and some members of the city council (which gained a progressive, anti-Chevron majority in the 2020 election) continued to discuss and study what it might mean to close down the century-old oil refinery, which has dominated this place from the very beginning. Communities for a Better Environment organized a crowded virtual public meeting to discuss what a healthy breakup between Chevron and Richmond might look like. The online chat window filled with comments from frustrated residents decrying all the ways that Chevron was making us feel like our illnesses are our fault; corrupt; toxic, a dance with death; paternalistic. The participants also feared what would happen when the company departed: when they’re done with Richmond, they leave us with a toxic waste dump, wrote one person.
But people in Richmond were also starting to realize that they, too, have influence. For one thing, the city has some authority over land and over what can be permitted within its boundaries. “The powerful have never been able to take land use planning away from local people,” says Greg Karras, author of the 2020 refinery decommissioning report. That means Richmond holds some authority over Chevron and the land that the refinery sits on. It means the people have a choice about what their future looks like.
It will still take time and imagination to figure out what this city can become.
I have taken one main lesson from observing the struggles of Richmond and other communities like it: we think of power as belonging only to a select few, those who rule the world and those who own most of the wealth. But there is a kind of power that grows from the ground around you. Power can come from community. Power can come from home—from knowing that we belong to a place and a planet, and it is our collective job to grow something useful here and to create space for the generations that come after us.
Enormous, radical solutions are necessary to remedy the climate crisis: big policies, big ideas, big economic shifts. So far, the rulers and the billionaires haven’t been leading us toward anything that will realistically keep us from catastrophe. So far, many of the most ambitious strides have come from the grass roots, from the marchers and protesters, the small-town mayors, the artists and teachers and musicians, the firefighters and farmers and scientists, the people who have their hands in the dirt, the people who are able to reimagine how to live. Here, in the smallest places, there are big transformations that could reverberate and ripple around the world, especially if we decided as a society to nourish such efforts, to lend our own energy to them, to dig in.
In September 2021, Urban Tilth bought the North Richmond Farm from the county. Doria had committed herself to this place long ago, but the purchase made it feel even deeper and more permanent. “There’s something about saying, ‘We’re not going to just move,’” she told me over the phone. “We’re not going to be able to screw this up, just move somewhere else and then leave our trash behind us.” But the land purchase was about more than just taking responsibility. Again, she and the Tilthers were sowing seeds, literally and metaphorically. “I am unsure of the exact destination of where this farm is going to take us. But I have faith that we’re seeding the kind of power our community needs to take control of our lives and to have a say in what happens in the world around us, in the environment, in the air and in the water, in our schools, in our government. I feel like these are the fertile conditions we need to grow something for ourselves.”
She and her fellow farmers would keep replenishing the soil, keep putting down deep roots, keep holding tightly to home.