home, n. the place where one has been born or reared. home, v. to go or return to one’s home.
When Doria Robinson was a little girl in the 1970s and 1980s, her bedroom window in Richmond, California, framed a view of two distinct landmarks. In the foreground loomed an oil refinery—a colossus of steel and concrete with a tangle of pipes that resembled a monumental Rube Goldberg creation. In the far distance, a blue and hazy hump of mountain shimmered across the San Francisco Bay. She never knew the mountain’s name until she was an adult: Mount Tamalpais. A playground of tourists and wealthy San Franciscans, it seemed to lie in a landscape of privilege that was not her own. But she learned early what the refinery was. Every day, she would watch it fume like a roiling thunderhead.
The city of Richmond grew up around a refinery, built in 1902—by the very company that Henry Flagler had cofounded, Standard Oil—along a dusty road next to a railroad settlement. By the 1940s, the place was ripe with promise, the “Wonder City,” the port and shipyard humming with World War II manufacturing. There were ample jobs building navy vessels in the vast shipyards run by Kaiser, and when there were not enough white men to fill these positions, the company recruited a significant number of women and people of color. Doria’s great-grandparents, on her father’s side, arrived during this period from rural Louisiana and Arkansas, part of the Great Migration, the decades-long exodus of Black Americans from the South, seeking to escape the violence of Jim Crow segregation.
But here the refining and manufacturing boom didn’t yield the sort of wealthy fantasy-life that it had offered some white Floridians. The Robinsons found many of the same troubles in California as in the South. At that time, Richmond enforced segregated sports and recreational facilities, movie screenings, and Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops, and the police could arrest and jail Black people if they couldn’t prove they were employed in the war effort. There was not nearly enough housing for the multitudes arriving to support the new industrial economy, and the workers also rented “hot beds” (for sleeping in shifts) and slept in movie theaters and even chicken sheds. Racial covenants that restricted homeownership to whites were codified into some deeds and rental agreements. New housing was explicitly segregated: local authorities barred Black residents from living in the sturdier, better-constructed properties—and forced them to flimsier, more temporary housing along the railroad tracks and near the factories and the refinery in an area sometimes nicknamed the Black Crescent. Still, there were jobs, so some hope of making a life here. And the labor of these migrants became the economic engine that transformed the San Francisco Bay Area into a modern economy. “They settled in the foothills of west Oakland and Richmond, far from the wealthy white cliff-side mansions and nearer to the shipyards. They planted their collards and turnip greens, and let chickens forage out the back,” writes author Isabel Wilkerson of the southern migrants who settled in California. Richmond’s population quadrupled between the late 1930s and the mid-1940s. Its neighborhoods were full of greenery—kitchen gardens and flower nurseries—and farm animals. And its downtown restaurants and movie theaters were thronged, like “carnival night every night every hour,” according to a 1945 account in Fortune magazine. That year, the housing authority also tried to evict thousands of tenants from wartime housing projects, and Black residents staged a series of demonstrations and a no-rent strike, which eventually forced some local officials to resign, a small victory.
Some chroniclers of Richmond insist the city’s slide into economic hardship began when the war ended and the shipyards and the Ford plant closed. (Ford had plenty of demand for its cars but moved its operations to a cheaper rural location.) Others say that “white flight” ultimately brought the place to its knees. After the war, real estate agents and bankers designated parts of the downtown (including the neighborhood where Doria’s family lived) as zones of “blight.” The term was originally associated with agriculture and the withering of crop plants, but in housing policy, “urban blight” was often a code word for the places where people of color lived. The Federal Housing Authority generally wouldn’t offer mortgage insurance to homebuyers in such areas,* keeping ownership out of reach for many Black residents, while many whites left for “nonblighted” parts of the city.
Meanwhile, after the wartime industries closed up, the most significant economic muscle remaining in Richmond was the refinery—which became Chevron in 1977. By the latter half of the twentieth century, as environmental awareness dawned across the United States, people in Richmond also noticed how the refinery could turn the city air so foul that it was difficult to breathe and how many young kids suffered from asthma. The refinery would often send out flares, balls of flame that were supposed to burn off excess gas. The flares could reverberate like an earthquake, rattling houses. Even the company’s seemingly benign gestures sometimes felt tainted: in 1976, after a shopping mall opened in a renovated oil tank farm that Chevron sold to a developer, the competition shut down many downtown retail businesses.
Still, the first few years of Doria’s life were in some ways a halcyon time. They were also marked by all the strains of growing up in a single-parent household with limited means. The old green bungalow where her mom, Kathy, raised Doria and her brother—mostly alone, after their father left when Doria was two years old—stood in the Iron Triangle, a neighborhood that jabs across the map like a sharp arrow and is named for the railroad tracks that run along three of its boundaries. A half block away and around the corner was a local history museum, formerly the city’s first public library, an ornate red Classical Revival building with imposing white columns—built in the early twentieth century with funding from steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, like a temple to American industry.
Doria could spin through the neighborhood on her bike with the kids on the block and walk or ride to the Apostolic church where her paternal grandfather served as minister. Her grandfather remained close with her mother even after the divorce. He was a huge-personality man who gathered a congregation of people from all over, she said, years later. Most had been farm folks before arriving in Richmond, and they knew how to grow something from nothing, literally and figuratively. The church bought a 320-acre ranch about thirty miles outside the city where the community raised beef cattle and set up a small mixed farm with fruits and vegetables, horses, chickens, pigs, and rabbits. They also bought rental properties around the city. They used the money from these ventures to pay for young Richmonders to attend trade schools and learn skills like carpentry and electrical work.
The church itself was an act of barn raising. Doria’s family and the parishioners helped tear down the old building and put up the new one by hand, the kids pulling nails with their stubby fingers, her uncles running the plumbing and the electrical. The church community would also organize to help one another in times of difficulty. Somebody’s house burned down. They’d build them another one. Things that should have been devastating tragedies for people became a way that people rallied and strengthened the church, Doria remembered. So growing up in that community made a huge impact on me and what I believe. My default for what is possible is totally different than for many people.
On weekdays, the parishioners ran after-school programs for Doria and the other children in the neighborhood. Afterward, the kids could pick up sweets for a dime or a quarter from a neighbor who ran a candy store across the street. Doria knew most of the people living in the blocks around the church—aunties, uncles, cousins, Mr. Thomas, Sister Easely, Sister Brown, Sister Clark. They left their doors unlocked, and she could wander in anytime and visit. Her great-grandfather lived about a mile away in old war-era housing and sold homemade mini-pies you could hold in your hand—loaded with pecans or peaches.
But in the mid-1980s, the crack cocaine epidemic spread across the country, seizing the younger generation, especially Black youth. It ripped through Richmond with stunning swiftness. People got strung out, Doria said. People started shooting each other and being crazy. Locks and iron security bars appeared on the doors. There were murders. Drive-by shootings. The police, instead of helping, would often harass neighbors—hollering insults at the very people who had tried to report the crimes in the first place, dragging people violently out of their houses. We had no police protection, Kathy Robinson recalled. We just decided as a neighborhood we were going to look after each other.
As before, the Robinson family took an undaunted, do-it-yourself approach to this terrifying set of circumstances. Always a whirlwind of energy, Kathy tried a thousand ways to pull her family and her neighbors out of danger and poverty—she ran her own craft business, making clothing and jewelry, launched after-school programs for hundreds of kids at the local YMCA, taught herself how to fix her own car so she wouldn’t have to pay the mechanic, took a few law classes, and sat in on the traffic court hearings of white people so she could figure out how to represent herself when she had her own complaints. (She would eventually sue the Y for discrimination after realizing they had paid her less than her less-industrious white coworkers.)
But this was not enough of a countervailing force. In his teen years, Doria’s brother was increasingly pressured and threatened by gangs in the Triangle. There were shoot-outs on the streets, and the house fronts, fence posts, and mailboxes became pocked and scarred with bullet holes. Eventually Kathy decided they had to leave. In a less-troubled area near Nicholl Park a couple miles away, she scoped out a vacant house—a fixer, a raggedy place cluttered with the unclaimed belongings of an elderly woman who had recently died. But the house had good bones, a lemon tree in the back, and a lush yard wrapped around the property, even if overgrown and weedy, so Kathy called a real estate agent and bought it in 1987. The family moved the year Doria celebrated her thirteenth birthday. In the years thereafter, six kids who lived in a house next door to their old place in the Iron Triangle—the children she used to ride bikes and play tag with—were shot and killed, not all at once but in a series of moments in the wave of senseless violence that passed through the city.
All of this is to say that by the time she entered her teens, Doria was already a kind of refugee: she had survived an economic disaster and a public health crisis that hardly anyone else in America seemed to be paying attention to. And for a while, the family just cleaned house. In the new place they cleared out cobwebs, dust, worn-out furniture, and an attic full of the previous owners’ papers and unanswered letters. Kids from a foster home for boys where Kathy worked at the time helped rip out the carpet. And the house became an oasis from the urban crisis beyond it.
In any good and righteous story of survival and tenacity, you would think this would be enough. You would imagine that a family so tenacious could reasonably rebuild their lives from here and prosper. But it is harder than this to escape the penumbra of a place like Richmond.
You couldn’t see the oil refinery from Doria’s new bedroom, but no one ever forgot it—the way it simmered on the horizon. Then, on an April day in 1989, the Robinsons were sucked back into another spiral of catastrophe. The Richmond Chevron Refinery exploded. It sounded like a bomb, Kathy recalled. And everything got black. The flames rose a hundred feet. A curtain of dark smoke unfurled above the city and much of the eastern San Francisco Bay. At times, the plume of pollution eclipsed the sun. It reminded me of the pictures you see of the atomic bomb explosions.
The Robinsons hunkered in their new house as instructed by authorities. Ash rained on the city, and the smoke didn’t dissipate fully for another six days. Afterward, Kathy inspected the two cars sitting in their driveway—a newer Volvo and a red sedan she’d bought new only to have it break down soon after. Whatever was in the air and the ash had eaten away bits of the paint from both of them.
Kathy avenged the situation a little by demanding money. In the months that followed, when Chevron was issuing compensation checks of a few hundred dollars to the people of Richmond to cover damages, she met with their lawyers and insisted they pay her $5,000 for her cars. If you don’t want me to go to the newspaper and tell them what you’re doing to poor people down here, you’re going to have to give me more money, she insisted coolly.
But it was so far from being enough, and Doria figured she was done battling this place of fire and decay. Oh my God, what a lost cause, she thought. When she was in high school, she realized she wanted to get out of here as soon as possible.
She couldn’t then imagine how Richmond would call her back. How something here had rooted into her, a strange and tenacious bit of hope and belonging, and she couldn’t so easily transplant herself. She would eventually try to grow something new here, something to make this unruly town into a place that might survive the twenty-first century. She would eventually realize that the disaster of Richmond was also the catastrophe of fossil fuels and of climate change. The refinery that loomed over the town was also one of the largest producers of greenhouse gases in California—and thus it had an outsize role in disturbing the planet’s climate. Both Richmond’s nightmares and its dreams were entangled with thousands of other calamities and communities around the world.
My first brief trip to Richmond, California, in my midtwenties, was not as a journalist; it was a social outing. But the image I formed of the place remained resonant later. My boyfriend—a jovial man with dark, curly mop-hair who later became my husband—invited me on an adventure to the San Francisco Bay Area to meet his friends, including Myk, who ran an unlicensed punk recording studio and performance space out of an old commercial building and who seemed like an inspired and degenerate character you might find in a Kerouac novel. The space, called Burnt Ramen, was well-known and beloved by punk fans. (One reviewer on Yelp called it “the most revered DIY venue in the Bay Area punk/crust/hc [hardcore] scene.”) And I would later learn Doria Robinson was also a punk fan and had a few times been a concertgoer at Ramen’s.
We rode there one night with a group of friends, who parked their cars in the street outside. Then we toured a set of rooms painted in bright and intricate art and graffiti. We watched Myk, a sinewy white guy with a goatee, and his girlfriend, a tall Black woman with a reedy voice, howl through a duet in his recording studio. Myk introduced us to his pet boa constrictor—who was lithe, several feet long, and fed on live rats purchased from the pet store—and his housemates, one of whom was too broke to pay full rent and lived in a kind of crawl space.
It was all a display of weird, inventive, and necessary creativity—the kind you might need to survive in a precarious place. When we left that evening, Myk’s girlfriend called after us, “Oh, you guys parked on the street!? Ooh, if you only knew! The other day someone came through here and smashed every single car window.”
But I didn’t think much about Richmond until a few years later, when I traveled back to California to research a series of articles on resilience, which was by then becoming a popular buzzword to capture everything from addiction recovery to preparing for the apocalypse. I arranged a meeting with Mateo Nube, cofounder of the environmental and climate justice organization Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project. Mateo directed me to the address via BART, the San Francisco–area regional rail system, about a half-mile walk from a station.
When I got there, I was surprised to find myself not at an office building but in front of a terra-cotta-colored house with blue window trim. On the porch a woman tended a potted plant, her hair pulled into a long white braid with delicate tendrils escaping into her face. This turned out to be Mateo’s mother, who smiled and told me to head around the back, where I was immediately awestruck by a cluster of spiky five-foot-tall plants so robust that I nearly took them to be cactuses, until I realized they were homegrown artichokes. Mateo’s family home doubled as his organization’s office. One of his colleagues lived next door, and they had pulled down the fence between them and established a shared garden, with a chicken coop, a set of rain barrels, and a composting toilet. Mateo met me in the yard. Tall and lean, with a pointed chin and a closely trimmed beard, he was dressed casually in gray cargo pants and an athletic jacket. He gestured for me to sit at a glass patio table across from him, and, with a cacophony of bird-chirruping and rooster-crowing in the background, he told me about the first time he’d had a revelation about climate change—around 2005, the year that Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans. Mateo was descended from a family of German Jews who had fled to South America to escape the Holocaust. He had come to the United States from Bolivia as a college student, and perhaps partly because of his family background, it wasn’t hard for him to connect the dots between the science of climate change and the human chaos it might cause—and from there to an experience of profound grief. “When I first started reading about climate change, I got really depressed. I freaked out,” he told me in a gentle tenor voice, clasping his hands, clad in black fingerless knit gloves, in a namaste prayer formation. “My first child had been born. She was a year old. I was like, wow, what has she been born into?”
Founded in the early 2000s, Movement Generation had brought together a loose network of activist groups that fought for policies related to equity, such as fair wages, tenants’ rights, police reform, and cleaning up the kinds of pollution that plagued communities like Richmond or Bayview Hunters Point in San Francisco—a neighborhood adjacent to a toxic waste dump and, until 2006, a polluting, coal-fired power plant. Collectively, the activists would brainstorm and trade strategies and ideas about the most effective means of creating lasting cultural and political change. Climate change was not originally part of these groups’ purview—at the time, it felt too distant, too overwhelming, and frankly, Mateo admitted, too much associated with white environmentalists who rarely welcomed the concerns of people of color.†
But Hurricane Katrina offered a prelude to the horrors the world might face in the climate crisis. And it was plainly not an equal-opportunity disaster. When the levees that were supposed to protect the city broke, they released floodwaters into a majority Black neighborhood called the Lower Ninth Ward, and the news coverage of the storm and its aftermath filled with images of suffering, including stories of Black New Orleanians in often desperate situations, standing thigh-deep in floodwaters or trapped on rooftops. Thousands of people were stranded inside the Louisiana Superdome, the sports arena turned shelter-of-last-resort that quickly became a kind of hell, with people penned behind metal barricades, with no sanitation, patrolled by armed National Guardsmen who did little to stop horrific crimes from occurring inside. Afterward, it became clear that the same sorts of discriminatory housing practices that placed the Robinsons in the path of refinery pollution also confined Black Louisianan homeowners to low-lying, flood-prone land. Black homeowners in New Orleans were three times likelier to suffer flood damage than white homeowners. But the federal government dished out recovery money based on the appraised value of houses—simply recapitulating the long and deadly history of inequality. After the hurricane, all of the problems of racial injustice worsened in that city. Child poverty rates soared; the chasm between rich and poor yawned wider.‡
Mateo and his colleagues observed these patterns from afar and could see how they would play out in cities everywhere on a hotter planet. Already, people of color and anyone living in poverty are far more likely to reside near polluting facilities. And as the planet heats up, higher temperatures worsen many kinds of air pollution. Global predictions also suggest food and water scarcity could be on the horizon, problems that would strike the most vulnerable first, especially those in poverty who can’t afford to pay premium prices for necessities. A 2009 study found that in Los Angeles, Black Americans were twice as likely to die from a heat wave, in part because they live more often in neighborhoods that are physically hotter, with more concrete, fewer trees, and less shade. Already, Black American communities face greater risks from flooding and hurricanes, especially in the South along the Atlantic coast. In the Bay Area, historically, most communities of color have occupied the “flatlands,” forged out of the San Francisco Bay from fill, dredged sediment, quarried rocks, and construction debris. In sea level rise projections, these landscapes are quickly dampened by the tide in a matter of decades.
Everything about climate change could make life worse for the communities these activists were fighting to protect. “To put it bluntly,” Mateo said, “if this set of issues isn’t taken on, all the other super-urgent issues we’re working on kind of become irrelevant in fifty years.”
So in 2007, Mateo and his Movement Generation colleagues began organizing a series of annual retreats in rural Sonoma County at an eco-farm and center for permaculture, a form of sustainable agriculture. There, away from the city, surrounded by fields of heirloom vegetables, a group of about thirty peers and collaborators from the Bay Area activist community—eventually including Alicia Garza, who would go on to cofound the Black Lives Matter movement—talked earnestly and seriously about climate change and what it meant for their work. And though it was a global crisis, they felt their approaches to it should start at home, informed by the perspectives of the vulnerable communities they lived in and worked with. One strategy, for instance, would be to advocate for policies that could prevent the kinds of horrors experienced during Katrina from recurring—fight against laws and planning decisions that might further divide cities into elite, gentrified, eco-friendly enclaves and poor, polluted ghettos. Simultaneously, they would campaign for policies that would be both sustainable and economically fair: for instance, infrastructure to make more public transit accessible to many rather than just to allow green cars to be purchased by the wealthy.
A second approach was to master a kind of urban self-reliance through, among other things, permaculture, partly so that when the crisis hit, poor communities could take care of themselves and collectively hatch their own solutions. (Growing food is also an act of renewal and sustenance, especially for communities that have often been denied the opportunities for beauty and solace that exist in wealthier places.)
The activists had also begun collaborating with other national and international social justice advocates in Boston, Miami, and Los Angeles, and the New York–based Right to the City Alliance—a group founded on the ideals of twentieth-century French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who believed that profound societal change could come from the sharing and reclaiming of urban spaces.
All of this was markedly different from the approach of some mainstream, mostly white environmental groups, who were spending much of their time pushing for solutions that would reallocate large sums of money—through policies such as cap-and-trade and offsets, both of which put a price on the privilege of emitting carbon—with the idea that you could, in this way, overhaul the old economy and conjure a new, green one.
At first glance, Movement Generation’s approach sounded a little rogue but full of unusual creativity born out of crisis. “Some people say we’re survivalists,” Mateo reflected, but the word sounded too individualistic to him. “It’s quite the opposite. We’re really trying to build collective solutions.”
Mateo was also devotedly anticapitalist and insisted that you would have to pull the old economy up by the roots to fix climate change, most especially yanking out the fossil fuel economy—which has always been by far the biggest source of climate pollution, about two-thirds of global carbon emissions.
For the moment, he was also focused on the tangible and immediate things he and his collaborators could do to rely less on that economy and more on what they could produce for themselves. Permaculture projects would help provide a model of another way to live, he explained, part of a cultural shift, what he called a “transformative narrative.”
Permaculture encourages its adherents to think of human communities as part of nature. In an urban setting, it reconceptualizes a city as an ecosystem, often a damaged one that you might want to restore. In doing this, you might try to root out the things that were polluting the urban environment and grow new ones in their places. Cities are a large component of climate change—home to 55 percent of the global population and responsible for simultaneously 80 percent of global gross domestic product and more than 60 percent of carbon emissions. Starting in a few small neighborhoods, in communities that carried the most risk and the greatest burdens of pollution and poverty, you could transform the urban landscape, and maybe the rest of the world would follow. This was radicalism in its truest sense—change from the root.
To deepen their collective knowledge of permaculture, Movement Generation had helped organize a series of hands-on workshops to teach skills such as composting or installing systems for collecting rainwater and gray water (recycled from activities like laundry). By 2010, the organization and its collaborators had built a number of urban gardens—including one in San Francisco in raised beds on the roof of what was then Alicia Garza’s office building, one in Oakland at the headquarters of a Latina immigrant rights organization, and the one behind the patio table where Mateo and I sat.
But one of the best examples of their strategy and thinking predated the Sonoma gatherings—a set of gardens and farms in Richmond, California, an initiative led by Doria Robinson.
There it was again, unusual creativity—a rain barrel and a composting toilet, an artichoke plant the size of a Christmas tree, a garden full of kale and squash as the tiniest first steps to begin reimagining the world, perhaps steering it away from a future of hurricanes and fossil fuel pollution and injustice.
To make better sense of all of this, I decided I would need to go back to Richmond.
A day later I rode BART to the edge of the Iron Triangle, Doria’s neighborhood, along the old Union Pacific railroad lines.
In the language of a twenty-first-century environmental activist, Richmond, California, is a frontline community, a place that has always faced the immediate consequences of fossil fuel extraction, long before anyone else woke up to the more global consequences, the problem of climate change. This is battle language—as in, the front lines of a war—and also a language of power. The dictionary definition of front line includes “a position at the forefront of new developments or ideas, or at the center of a social, political, or ideological debate; the vanguard.”
But in the 1990s and early 2000s, many people thought of Richmond and places like it—in the inner city, along the Gulf of Mexico, in the shadow of gargantuan industrial facilities, next to coal mines, sliced open by massive highways—as disposal sites, throwaway communities, landscapes of waste.
In 1991, poet Adrienne Rich wrote of this tendency to waste human resources as if it were a tragic (but not inevitable) part of the American national character: “Waste. Waste. The watcher’s eye put out, hands of the / builder severed, brain of the maker starved / those who could bind, join, reweave, cohere, replenish / now at risk in this segregate republic.” And Richmond was like a testament to this idea, full of both toxicity and “human wreckage,” writes labor organizer Steve Early. Leaking battery cases lay buried beneath a shoreline park. Carcinogenic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from old utility equipment leached into local groundwater. Land owned by old pesticide companies lay overgrown and full of dangerous chemicals. Radioactive material lurked in the landfill. Crime continued to soar in Richmond; 1991 saw the city’s peak number of homicides, sixty-two deaths. “Meanwhile, Richmond’s African American community was decimated from within by the highest rate of AIDS transmission in the Bay Area,” writes Early. “In search of personal security, better housing and schools, or improved job prospects, middle-class Blacks joined the trajectory of Richmond’s earlier white flight.” If such a place was your hometown, you learned a particular story, that to succeed in life, your first job was to escape. The story said you had to get out of poverty—as if poverty were a place and not a condition.
In her teen years, Doria launched a furious campaign to extract herself from her hometown. First, she applied and was admitted on a scholarship to a private college-prep school in Berkeley for her last two years of high school. To cover her extra expenses and tuition, she worked multiple jobs including evening shifts at a Berkeley pizza parlor. After midnight—when BART had closed—she rode her bike eight miles back to Richmond. The pizza shop owner took an interest in Doria’s educational ambitions and gave her generously large payroll advances so that she could afford to join the school’s international field trips to places like Egypt and Israel. She tossed dough and served pizzas for a year after high school in order to pay the remainder of her tuition. Then in 1993, she left for the opposite side of the country—Hampshire College, an experimental liberal arts school in Massachusetts. In 1995, she fled farther—to the opposite side of the world, a year abroad in India and Nepal, through what was supposed to be a formal program in Tibetan studies but turned into a free-for-all. The institution that was hosting her and her schoolmates stopped offering classes a couple months in, and her peers, whose families gave them ample travel money, abandoned their schoolwork and left for backpacking excursions through Asia. Doria had no cash to spare. So she bartered for a room in a monastery by offering English lessons to the monks. There, she immersed herself in ad hoc spiritual study with a series of meditation teachers who lived nearby.
In the retelling, the experience was almost mythic. Doria knew that a person from her background, from a beat-up town full of pollution, wasn’t often given such free access to the world. I got all transformed. I didn’t talk the same, she thought. I should be doing something important. I wanted to lead a spiritual life. She thought about staying in India and becoming a Buddhist nun. Survivor guilt—her successful, improbable escape into another life while other kids from her street never made it to adulthood—haunted her meditations. She wept often.
The person I was working with was a meditator in the mountains. He literally lived in a rock house, an hourlong hike in the foothills above Dharamshala. One day she had a meeting with him there to ask him questions about her meditation practice and her thoughts of becoming a spiritual devotee, removed from the traumas of her past. His response was abrupt. He was like, “You need to go home.” She was crestfallen. At the time, it felt like he was saying, “You’re useless.” In retrospect, he meant, “You don’t make any sense here. There’s work for you to do in Richmond.”
She didn’t want to heed the advice. I was like, I’m not going back there. She moved to San Francisco, at first working the graveyard shift for an organic produce distributor, all night, unloading trucks, hauling pallets into a cooler. She found it meaningful but exhausting and left for advertising work in the early dot-com sector—higher paid but, to her, vapid.
She started taking art classes and reconsidering what she might do next with her career. Then she became pregnant with twins, a boy and a girl. She had met their father at an art festival, but he was a wanderer, with a tourism job that sent him on stints through Canada, California, and Mexico. And Doria suddenly wanted to be tethered to a place, to something real, some solid piece of earth where she could raise her young children.
She also wanted to get her hands dirty again, literally craved her own plot of vegetables, but San Francisco community garden spots had seemingly endless waiting lists. I felt like I had all these skills, and I’d learned so much and everything. I need to go where I can actually make a difference. She finally found a job based in Richmond doing watershed restoration—tending plants, greening urban lots—and her paternal grandparents (the minister and his wife) asked if Doria wanted to manage her great-aunt’s house, a little, little house with a very big yard, three bedrooms, stucco on the outside, and a wide porch slung across the front. It was about a half mile from where Doria spent her early years and about two blocks from her grandfather’s church in the Iron Triangle. The area was thoroughly urban, and yet in her childhood, her uncle had kept a horse and a cow in the backyard.
She went to see the house. It was a heap. It had been destroyed. Random renters and different church members had come in with huge families. It was the kind of thing where you open the door, and there’s that smell that hits you. The walls were painted drab gray with paint and plaster falling off, full of holes, with mildew and mold growing in strange places. She found grease stains behind the stove and gunk caked in the refrigerator. The yard and the shed were full of piles of old junk.
But she remembered her great-aunt, how the house used to be clean and the yard full of roses. And Doria felt she had to revive the place. She had entered a plot twist in the story she had previously told herself. Poverty no longer felt like a place you ran from; it was more like an old weedy lot, a bit of broken earth, a crumbling fence, or a run-down house that needed repairs. She was tired of wasting things and people. She moved in when the twins were about two years old and began clearing the space, creating room for bicycles and toys and garden implements. About six years later, she painted the house marmalade orange and midnight blue, then a few years later repainted it to sunflower yellow. The family adopted a feral kitten, a gray-and-black tabby that the kids fished out of a trash can and named Tobias (after author Tobias Wolff). Doria planted a peach, an apricot, and a pomegranate tree in the yard. When the trees started bearing fruit, elderly women would stroll past the yard on Sundays, on the way to church, and ask to pick the peaches for making pie. Giving away peaches became one of Doria’s fondest, simplest pleasures.
Circumstances had improved only a little in Richmond since she was a teen. Chevron§ had not cleaned up its act much; between 2001 and 2003, the EPA noted nearly three hundred pollution spills from the refinery. “These are highly toxic, often cancerous, chemicals spilling directly into residential communities of families, children, the elderly, and the sick,” writes investigative journalist Antonia Juhasz in her book The Tyranny of Oil.
Nor did the town feel safe. Violent crime had been decreasing for the past couple of decades, but the city still had a homicide rate about five times higher than the California average.
But there has always been a forceful undercurrent of grassroots activism running through Richmond and numerous efforts to raise up the community—from Black Panthers offering free breakfast to schoolchildren in the 1960s to antipollution activism aimed at Chevron beginning in the 1980s. Communities for a Better Environment—a feisty California-based environmental justice organization with a track record of bringing legal and political challenges against the fossil fuel industry—opened an office in the community in that decade. Together, they and a homegrown Richmond environmental group, the West County Toxics Coalition, founded in 1986, brought a successful class action lawsuit against a Richmond-based chemical facility over a fire that released noxious fumes. That win in the 1990s provided settlement money for, among other things, a warning system, so that residents would at least be alerted to the next industrial emergency, including a refinery fire. (Once a month, Richmond tests the sirens for less than three minutes, a reminder of the potential for disaster.) The Asian Pacific Environmental Network began organizing the Laotian community in Richmond around the same time, and pushed the city to set up a multilingual emergency warning system after a major refinery fire in 1999.
By the 2000s, there were additional political efforts to reclaim the city that didn’t exist during Doria’s youth. A group of local activists had also organized a series of grassroots campaigns to run against the old guard of Chevron supporters on the city council. By comparison to the well-moneyed efforts of their opponents, the progressive election campaigns of the 2000s were scrawnily funded. But in 2004, Gayle McLaughlin, a former schoolteacher, a democratic socialist, and member of the Green Party, improbably grabbed a seat. In 2006, she won the mayoral election, making Richmond the largest city in the United States with a Green mayor. Doria volunteered for her campaign, knocking on doors, walking precincts, and making phone calls. It was the fact that she was saying, “I’m not going to take money from corporations, and I’m going to shift the conversation in Richmond to quality of life and to bringing the kind of industry and the kind of jobs that we really need.” What she was trying to do is what people wanted, at least people who vote.
That same autumn, locals set up a sit-in and tent encampment in Nevin Park, less than a block from Doria’s childhood house in the Iron Triangle, to protest a wave of deadly gang shootings that had occurred earlier that year. In a convenience-store parking lot across the street, people assembled a shrine to someone who had died in a recent shooting. (Their efforts would help inspire McLaughlin to push her colleagues in the city to set up an office of neighborhood safety.)
Such things felt like seeds, and Doria looked for more ways to dig in. She heard about a new community gardening organization called Urban Tilth, formed by a teacher named Park Guthrie, who lived just outside of Richmond, in an unincorporated part of the county. Park had proposed an ambitious vision for the old Santa Fe railroad line corridor, a place that seemed to symbolize all that was wrong and all that was possible.
In Doria’s childhood, the railroad right-of-way had been the awkward shortcut to her grandparents’ house, the makeshift path everyone used as a pedestrian thoroughfare. You could walk the rocky track ballast and the crooked wooden ties—in some places, the tracks had been removed, and in others, the metal still jutted up. It was an interstitial landscape, hairy with coarse grass and tall stems of aggressive fennel gone wild, streaked with graffiti and littered with broken glass and used syringes and condoms.
For decades, community activists had clamored for this moldering two-mile strip of land to be converted into a paved bike path and green corridor, and, in the mid-1990s, while Doria was away, the city had pulled out the old tracks and regraded the ground so it was level. It wasn’t until 2007 that the bike path finally opened. In the beginning, few people used it. Doria tried to jog the path, and when she would approach someone from behind, they would sometimes startle at the sound of her footfalls and turn toward her with their fists clenched. They thought I was gonna jump them.
But Park wanted to turn the Richmond Greenway into a real gathering place, and a description of his ideas circulated on a community email list. Berryland, with all different types of berries that kids could just come up on their bikes and eat. It sounded so ridiculous then. But it was beautiful, like really engaging and inspiring, and I called him up, and I was like, “Let’s make it happen.” She assembled a group of neighbors in her backyard one Saturday to discuss, and a week later, they held a volunteer workday and staked out where the beds would be.
The word tilth refers to cultivated land and soil. One of its oldest meanings is also “honest labor,” and another definition refers to the cultivation of knowledge, humanity, and decency. Urban Tilth wanted to bring all these things forth from the old battered ground of the Iron Triangle. But the organization had little money. Everything was donated and most of the labor came from volunteers. They had to haul clean dirt to the site to make sure it was uncontaminated by whatever chemicals might lie buried in the ground of the railyard, especially arsenic. But within a year, there were eighteen kinds of berries planted along a stretch of the Greenway, and the old railroad tracks were transformed from a shadowy shortcut no one was supposed to take to a small oasis. When the berries ripened, you could find people wandering here, their hands stained with red and blue fruit.
Doria began to see vacant land wherever she looked in the city—and instead of the old empty lots seeming like eyesores, they appeared to have potential. A year after volunteering with Urban Tilth, Doria became an employee, and she, Park, and her fellow local gardeners looked for places to create gardens wherever they could find them. At the high school, at a decommissioned and largely abandoned middle school, in church lots, and in private front yards, they would grow food.
In 2007, a thunderous bang, a ball of golden flame, and a cloud of ash announced that another fire had broken out at the Chevron refinery after a corroded pipe failed. Across the bay, Antonia Juhasz witnessed the incident (and described it later in The Tyranny of Oil): “In January 2007, most residents of the area (I among them) thought the refinery had exploded.… The five-alarm fire burned for nine hours, and the 100-foot flames could be seen with the naked eye in San Francisco,” roughly ten miles away.
As the sirens wailed, Doria was loading plants into her car. I remember thinking to myself, do I go inside to shelter in place? Or do I try to pack the car fast? Then I was ranting to myself as I was driving to work, thinking, why do they get to do this? Why don’t I have a say in this? Who owns the sky?
In the end, wind blew much of the smoke away from Richmond and other population centers, but Doria’s rage would not dissipate so quickly. But she wouldn’t try to run from Richmond this time. She would stand her ground. She would nourish this polluted place.
For an out-of-towner, BART is clean but noticeably loud. The train screams and shrieks along the tracks. A day after meeting with Mateo, I watched through a train window as the landscape transitioned from the leafy streets of Berkeley into miles of strip malls, empty lots, junkyards, and abandoned warehouses with rusting corrugated roofs.
Doria Robinson met me in the Richmond BART parking lot, wearing black sweatpants with a racing stripe down the side and a purple shirt printed with a drawing of a bicycle and the words BEAUTIFUL MACHINE, her hair in long, tight dreadlocks. She greeted me by announcing that her car had broken down, and we’d have to wait for a colleague to meet us. (Years later, she would confess that she’d been out of gas money and subsequently run her tank empty but was too embarrassed to tell me.) We stood awkwardly on the pavement for a few minutes, and Doria filled the time by offering me a summary of her organization’s philosophies—and talking a mile a minute. “One of our principles is that there’s plenty of resources. There’s just not enough all in the right place,” she told me. For instance, there was land abandoned by industries, businesses, and institutions that had packed up and left decades ago—it stood vacant, gaping, wasted. And everywhere there was need and hunger—for hope, for health, for community, for opportunity. The trick was to understand how the first problem could actually be an answer to the second. “We get all kinds of donated stuff from the city or from people—mulch and all kinds of straw and logs. We’ll build our raised beds out of old eucalyptus trees that have been cut down and whatnot. So we’re kind of scavengers. We don’t have any gardens that we operate on private lands. We do everything on public land.”
Several minutes into this discussion, a hardy, brown-haired twenty-two-year-old named Adam Boisvert drove up in a pickup truck, and he and Doria urged me to climb in after them. Thus began our whirlwind tour of the city, zipping through a patchwork of empty lots, old warehouses wreathed with barbed wire, churches, and rows of bungalows with small, sun-dried brown grass lawns and metal grates over the windows and doors.
In the four years since Doria helped plant the first berries, Urban Tilth’s efforts had grown into a rangy, gangly, scrappy effort. She had collected staff with the same philosophy that guided her other efforts—many were people whose worth and labor and know-how would otherwise be wasted. Broadly speaking, most of them were still kids, some just out of high school. Many had come up through an apprentice program that the organization’s staff had first launched with kids from Richmond High School. (Adam was an exception, a graduate from the University of California, Berkeley, who had met Doria serendipitously on a bicycle trail and was chasing his passion for organic farming. “I always joke that Adam is the one token non-Richmonder,” she said.) Eleven staff worked at eleven gardens, mostly part-time and seasonally, with a donated office space and gardening supplies, subsisting on an almost impossibly meager budget. (She would later admit to me that they were often running on fumes, so to speak, in those years.) To fill the gaps, they sometimes took on paid private work through a program called Farm Your Lawn, in which an individual property owner might hire the kids to transform a yard into a food garden. Above all, the organization ran on conviction and faith. Doria’s goal was for the city of Richmond to grow at least 5 percent of its own food. In 2009, Urban Tilth had harvested six thousand pounds of produce. (This was simultaneously a lot of food and a drop in the bucket relative to what an entire city would eat. But it was also a visionary achievement—proof that you could coax something nourishing from an otherwise neglected urban landscape.)
The truck arrived at a linear strip of land that ran perpendicular to the street with a paved bicycle trail threading through the center. The land stretched out on either side of the pavement—behind a school, some old warehouses and a corrugated metal building that served as an auto body shop, and alongside some residential buildings. The three of us disembarked. A wooden sign announced the location: BERRYLAND, on a bright yellow and black background splotched with images of ripe raspberries. Tawny bark mulch covered the ground—so that walking felt like a spongy, springy activity—and the garden stretched across it, various rectangular raised beds edged with wooden boards and logs. The breeze carried the scent of eucalyptus. WELCOME TO THE LINCOLN SCHOOL FARM. BIENVENIDOS A LA GRANJA, read another sign with rainbow-colored lettering. Berryland had expanded to include a vegetable garden farmed by a nearby group of elementary schoolchildren. “They come out and maintain it and harvest and learn about photosynthesis and whatnot,” Doria explained. “And people from the community can come and harvest whatever they want.”
Behind us was a raised bed lush with strawberry plants, and plump fruits dangled from the edges. There were other beds with boysenberries, raspberries, blueberries, pineapple guava, gooseberries. “The berries don’t usually stay for very long once they come up. People just eat them. And that’s the point. And you can come at all hours, all times, and people are harvesting something.”
At the edge of the garden, a mural along the warehouse walls depicted a series of bright puzzle pieces—each painted by kids from local foster homes with a different image, mostly animals, people, bugs, trees, butterflies.
“A student from San Francisco Academy of Art came up with the idea,” Doria said. “And the kids connected the puzzle pieces all together—that’s kind of how community works. Like it all kind of connects, even though people can be so different.”
Other beds were full of fruits, herbs, and vegetables—tomatoes, green beans, onions (“because people really, really eat the onions”), mint (beloved by members of a local mosque, who used it to make mint tea), peas, melons. Some of the vegetables were specific to local tastes and histories: next to a bolted parsley plant stood a tall brassica called purple tree collard, a varietal that had reputedly traveled from Africa to Black communities in the South and eventually to Richmond. These stood beside more murals with images of flowers and mushrooms.
A petite woman wearing gardening gloves wandered into the scene, and Doria introduced her affectionately as “Ms. Tania,” Tania Pulido. “This girl has her hands in everything.”
The twenty-year-old now managed Berryland, Doria’s former job, and oversaw a group of teenage apprentices, including a pair of cousins who lived in a house around the corner. Doria had hired them after they had wandered onto the Greenway more than once and started offering to help move mulch and logs around.
“You know, they were kind of hanging out, playing Nintendo, trying not to get into major, major trouble. They’d be like, ‘You want some help with that?’ And finally, we’re like, ‘Do you want to work with us?’” Once they signed up, they began to organize extra volunteer crews made up of their friends.
On the second Saturday of every month, the crew would host a barbecue with community members. At the most recent, Tania’s family had made chicken mole.
It was a subtle but crucial shift not just in the landscape of Richmond but also in its culture and self-image. (To borrow the words of Adrienne Rich, it was the “meticulous delicate work of reaching the heart of the desperate / woman, the desperate man /—never-to-be-finished, still unbegun work of repair.”) “People really bunker down,” Doria explained to me. “People go inside of their barred houses and hide from the world after they get off work and don’t go out in the street. Kids don’t play outside. The gardens are kind of central to giving people an opportunity to live a little, come out of their bunkers.”
There is a strangeness to our collective relationship with oil and fossil fuels. Many of us can’t fully imagine what our lives would look like without them—what it would mean not to fill up at the pump, not to turn on the gas furnace—and yet our continued reliance is poisoning both present and future. For precisely this reason, we have called fossil fuels an addiction—a dependency so toxic, especially because of its role in climate change, that it could wreck the very foundations of our society. But unlike with drugs, not every petroleum addict suffers the immediate consequences. Communities at the margins and in the shadows of mainstream society have to bear the worst impacts: high lead levels, increased childhood asthma, low birthweights, respiratory disease, lung cancer. The hideousness of pollution and toxicity is unavoidable in Richmond. By contrast, the hideous impacts of climate change—caused primarily by our collective reliance on fossil fuels—have only become obvious to the majority of people in the last decade or so.
In the face of all this, it is a radical thing to imagine you can grow food in an oil town.
A little after Berryland began on the Greenway, another Urban Tilth project launched at Richmond High School when a teacher and friend of Park Guthrie wanted to fix up an old garden that had been neglected for more than a decade. Behind the rust-colored trailers that served as extra classrooms, he, Park, and a group of students revived a series of garden beds, planting them first with fruits and flowers and later vegetables, and spruced up an old greenhouse. Park and the teacher also organized an urban agriculture club, and then a class as a partnership between Urban Tilth and the high school. Shortly thereafter, Urban Tilth hired a Richmond High student named Jessie Alberto, first to work on the Greenway. Then, after he graduated, he also assisted with the class and with another garden at a second high school, called Kennedy. The mascot of Richmond High School is an oil well, and the team is called the Oilers. But the Urban Tilth class curriculum was either subversive or simply honest, depending on your perspective—about ecology, fairness, pollution, oil, nutrition, food deserts, and why some people get left out of the economy.
Park eventually stepped back from the organization to take a teaching job himself, and Doria took the helm. Then she and the other Tilthers decided to expand the gardens at Richmond High. The high school had ample grounds where they could imagine cultivating plants, but it was a difficult time for the community. In the fall of 2009, a teenage girl was beaten and gang-raped outside the Richmond High homecoming dance, one of the worst acts of violence the school had ever known. It would take years for this trauma to even begin to heal (and for the eventual criminal trials to resolve).
The school and the community still needed a reminder that it was possible to grow promising things here. On one winter weekend in 2010, a massive volunteer effort of high school students, teachers, and others from the community built six more long raised beds behind the Richmond High football field—nearly eight hundred square feet of cultivation space where they could grow more fruits and vegetables—and another thirteen crop rows and 2,600 square feet at Kennedy.
The kids of Urban Tilth usually had a different vision of the city than many of its older residents. Tania Pulido came to the gardens after barely graduating high school by a hair, she said later. In school, she cut class often. Her family, originally from Mexico, nearly lost their house after her dad was fired from his job during the economic slump of the late 2000s. She went through a dark moment, questioning, she said, her very existence, and began dressing in all black. A lot of kids she knew were excited to receive a check from Chevron when they turned eighteen—settlement money from a previous refinery incident. But Tania formed doubts. She loved documentary films and watched a series of movies about oil, eventually deciding that she would campaign against the company. She began attending protests. She then met Jessie Alberto and started volunteering in the garden at the same high school she had previously avoided attending. On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in early 2011, she helped with an Urban Tilth festival at the Greenway. Three hundred volunteers turned out to clean up, tend the garden beds, and feast on vegetables harvested there, and the organizers provided a stage where youth performed Mexican dancing, spoken word, and a comedy routine.
Alfonso Leon first became aware of Urban Tilth during his sophomore, junior, and senior years of high school, when he was working on a local nonprofit project that sent him on a quest through the city to map creeks and rivers. Then he enrolled in the Richmond High urban agriculture class. He vividly recalled how it had felt when he was just six years old, in 1999, and the Chevron refinery had caught fire once again, sending 1,200 people to local hospitals. He remembered how he had sheltered first at school and then in his family’s house as if a storm were passing through. Even as a kid, I just knew what the refinery was. This is like the freaking pits of Mordor. This place is pure evil. But he didn’t think oil would always be the city’s destiny. When Alfonso looked at Richmond, he didn’t just see crumbling industry or barbed wire or vacant lots. He saw nature.
Just after Alfonso graduated in 2011, at the age of eighteen, he was hired as an Urban Tilth employee, supervised by Jessie Alberto. One of his primary responsibilities was to cultivate food on the grounds of his former middle school, which had since been shut down because of earthquake safety concerns and city shortfalls, then abandoned, and at one point, set on fire by arsonists. At some of its first school sites Urban Tilth had secured keys from staff and teachers and persuaded groundskeepers to switch on the water, then later asked the administration for formal permission. Doria, Park, and their burgeoning army of youth often took an act-now-apologize-later strategy to their endeavors. But by the time serious cultivation began at the middle school site, the school district had negotiated a formal land-use agreement with the organization. On breezy, grassy land beside the school, Alfonso and Jessie Alberto planted a one-acre fruit and vegetable farm, large enough to supply weekly boxes of produce to a couple dozen Richmonders through the long California growing season.
It was part of a larger push-pull happening in Richmond more generally, a feeling that the community was trying to change its identity but could only do this by struggling with its past. The mayor and her progressive allies sought out green businesses and actively tried to entice them to move to Richmond. McLaughlin also spearheaded efforts to create more renewable-energy training options within a local jobs program. In 2009, the old Ford assembly plant by the waterfront reopened partly as a headquarters for SunPower, a company that assembles rooftop solar panels, partly as an event space where dancers and derby skaters and even hundreds of meditators at a mindfulness conference would gather in the light of the tall glass windows. It also housed a company that made countertops from recycled glass. The plant’s former oil house became a visitors center for the National Park Service.
Meanwhile, a Safeway closed in Richmond, leaving the city with only three full-size grocery stores. Meanwhile, a new study said childhood obesity rates in the city were rising. Meanwhile, a graffiti artist nicknamed Nacho left his scrawl all over the Iron Triangle while eluding the befuddled police. A small Richmond company sold vegetable seedlings and also produced lettuce fertilized via the by-products of aquaculture—that is, fish manure. A world-famous submarine designer worked on building a minisub in Point Richmond that could explore the world’s deepest deep-sea trench, near Guam. A congregation in the Iron Triangle was forcibly evicted from an Apostolic church after it fell behind on mortgage payments on a loan some felt was predatory; police handcuffed the minister and his wife and eighty-year-old mother and led them away.
As ever, Richmond stood at the edge of promise and peril.
In 2012, a group of Urban Tilthers—Tania, Adam, and a rotating cast of other coworkers and friends—were sharing a three-bedroom house the color of old dishwater in the Richmond Annex, at the south edge of Richmond and the neighboring city, El Cerrito, about four miles from the refinery and two from where Doria and her kids lived in the Iron Triangle. For the Tilthers, it was a moment of little money but much camaraderie. A lot of us were super broke. It was a friend’s grandmother’s house. It was very inexpensive to live there, Tania recalled later. It was also a moment of transformation for Tania. After struggling academically in high school, she had attended a community college, then been accepted to a program in peace and conflict studies at the University of California, Berkeley. I have to make my parents proud, and I’m gonna prove to myself that I can do this, she thought. She tended the Richmond Greenway garden part-time, transitioning to full-time in the summer, while Adam worked at the Richmond High farm.
The housemates set up a chicken coop in the backyard. In the evening, they often cooked big meals together, usually frittatas or stir-fries with eggs and garden vegetables in a combined kitchen-dining room with an odd assortment of red and black cabinets. We would have these feasts. We would laugh sometimes. Yeah, we’re poor, but we eat good, Tania said. One window faced north to El Cerrito. The other looked toward Richmond and the tail of refinery smoke that always curled up on the horizon. Because it was so well lit they called it the sunroom and would linger there often, as late-day, orange-ember California sunsets angled through the western window.
A multiyear drought spread across California, the worst to hit the Central Valley and the California coast in 450 years. It would eventually cause an unprecedented die-off of trees in the Sierra Nevadas, decimate ranches and farms, and set the stage for a series of tragic megafires, including the 2018 Camp Fire. But Urban Tilth wouldn’t feel the worst of this. The organization held its biggest summer apprenticeship program to date—forty-seven kids working the soil, turning out fruit and veggies.
That summer was also the 110th anniversary of the Chevron Richmond refinery. The Richmond Museum of History, in the historic library building around the corner from Doria’s childhood house, announced that in the second week of August an exhibit would open to mark the occasion with music and refreshments.
On that Monday, August 6, the kids in Urban Tilth’s apprenticeship program gathered at the abandoned middle school’s one-acre farm and at the Greenway and the Richmond High garden for one of their last work days of the season; the beds were loaded with crops such as squash, zucchini, corn, basil, and tomatoes.
And at about 6:30 that evening, a fire started in the Richmond refinery.
It began when a pipe ruptured, enveloping nineteen refinery workers in a vapor cloud. Eighteen of them fled, and one lingered in firefighting gear, which kept him alive as leaked fuel ignited and burst into a fireball inside one of the engines. Within minutes a cloud of white smoke enveloped the facility; then a more ominous black plume, opaque as fabric, like heavy black robes, lifted up into the sky, then orange torrents of flame. The smoke rose to four thousand feet, higher than the summit of Mount Tamalpais across the water.
The sirens awoke and screamed a warning across the city.
Tania and Adam were in the backyard when they heard the noise, and Tania knew instantly this wasn’t a drill. Something was wrong. They saw a large plume of smoke and halo of distant flame over the fence line, and everyone at the Tilther house headed indoors to the sunroom and watched, mesmerized, through the window as a black cloud spread over the city. One housemate took panoramic photos, and they sat for hours, as each neighborhood disappeared beneath the smoke. Tania’s mother, who lived nearer to the refinery, called her and said the smoke had blotted out the sun. But there was nothing to do but wait it out. I was thinking about all the people who had to deal with their asthma, and all the animals who live outside, Tania remembered. I was thinking about my community, my friends, my family, my loved ones. And then, of course, I was thinking about the garden. And it was just a deep sadness—and I was very enraged.
Closer to the center of the city, Doria Robinson had just arrived at her house when the smoke appeared in the sky. It’s all happening again, she thought. But it was bigger than anything she remembered. The flames were visible over the tops of the houses. I was like, What the hell is going on? She was alone that day; her kids had gone to visit their dad, and she was grateful that they didn’t have to take smoke into their young lungs. She walked into her house and called her mother to make sure she was safe. Then her staff began calling: she told them to make sure all the Tilthers and kids went home to shelter in place.
Only after all of this did she have time to consider how the soot was falling on the gardens, possibly rendering the produce inedible, untouchable. All the food, all the labor, all the hope, what if it was ruined in an instant? And for the first time in years, she would ask herself if she should really be doing this work. Was it safe to grow anything in this beleaguered city?
That evening, she posted an image on Facebook of the tall and sickening conflagration rising above Chevron. It looked like a bomb had been dropped on the city. She wrote, This is what it means to live on the front lines! WHO OWNS THE SKY???!!!
A few weeks after the smoke cleared, I would sit with Doria in her yellow house and drink tea, and she would tell me what it all meant to her—this ugly, shocking, and powerful moment of revelation.
But in the moment, everything was dark. In the moment, there was rage, and debris to deal with.