0.    Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius is often credited for first proposing, in 1896, that excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might warm the Earth. According to the book All We Can Save, though Eunice Newton Foote, the first female climate scientist, theorized about the connection between atmosphere and temperature decades earlier, she never received much recognition.

0.    Jerry Williams, the former national director of fire and aviation management for the U.S. Forest Service, coined the term megafire and convened a scoping group on such extreme fires in 2003. “We’re seeing … a new type of fire … in the U.S., Russia, Australia, Greece, South Africa.… It seems like every year we see a ‘worst one.’ And the next year we see a worse one yet,” Williams said in 2011, in a talk recounted in the book Megafire by Michael Kodas. The meaning has been hard to pin down, with some experts insisting the term should refer to the intensity of the fires. The most common definition, according to many sources, is any wildfire larger than one hundred thousand acres.

0.    In the words of Kimmerer and Lake, “Indigenous practice and philosophy offer us an alternative view of the ‘natural’ fire regime, in which humans regain their role as ‘keepers of the fire’ and the symbiotic relationship between humans, forests, and fire is reestablished for mutual benefit.”

0.    There are multiple gases that contribute to the warming of the Earth when humans emit too much of them into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is by far the most prevalent, but methane, nitrous oxide, and fluorinated gases are also part of the problem. The term “greenhouse gases” refers to all of these and harkens back to when climate change was called “the greenhouse effect” in the late twentieth century. Throughout this book, I’m using “carbon emissions” as a generic term for greenhouse-gas emissions.

0.    In the last several years, a whole field of study has emerged to quantify the intangible losses associated with climate change. Losses related to culture, identity, heritage, emotional well-being, and the sacredness or spirituality of people’s relationship to a place or a community—not to mention experiences like the joy, love, beauty, or inspiration found in a cherished landscape—are nearly impossible to quantify in economic terms. So scholars of intangible loss are now trying to find other ways to account for them, formally, for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “We have to find a better way to make visible what is often overlooked, ridiculed, dismissed as too personal, not generalizable, not quantifiable,” says Petra Tschakert, who is a professor of geography at the University of Western Australia and who has also studied solastalgia in Ghana.

0.    It is about seven feet above a standardized benchmark for sea and tide levels called the North American Vertical Datum of 1988.

0.    “Room for the River,” or Ruimte voor de Rivier, is described in vivid detail in one of the best-known accounts of climate change, Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe (2006).

0.    Leslee Keys eventually wrote a book about the Ponce, published by the University Press of Florida in 2015. She calls the building “an imaginative and exuberant expression of the Gilded Age fascination with art and architecture” and “one of Florida’s and the nation’s most remarkable buildings.”

0.    The human family tree is complex and difficult to chart in any straightforward way. In older interpretations, Homo habilis is the direct ancestor of Homo erectus. But more recent archaeological finds show that the two lived side by side and might have had a common ancestor. Other hominids (like Neanderthals) also shared the planet with Homo erectus and with Homo sapiens over various periods of time in the last two million years. We are all related, but scientists are still determining exactly how.

0.    Marean would later argue they had been made via a complex method that involved heating them in a fire, more evidence of smarts.

0.    The Indigenous San people of the Kalahari Desert, some of the few traditional nomadic hunter-gatherers left on Earth, move every several days, migrating along familiar routes.

0.    Alice Rearden, a Yup’ik scholar and schoolteacher from Bethel, explains in detail: “Stinkheads are usually salmon heads fermented underground in a pit lined with grass and covered. The process is usually done in summer, and the delicacy is eaten right after it is taken out from underground. Salmon roe is also partially dried outside on racks and then fermented in containers usually in a cool place.” Proper preparation is crucial, says Rearden. “Stinkheads have caused deaths over the years through botulism because of being improperly cured in plastic buckets.”

0.    “These days, seal oil is rendered from seal blubber placed in buckets, but sometimes people will ferment it in a hollowed-out sealskin container,” says Rearden. During my visits to Newtok, I witnessed the bucket method but not the older, more traditional one.

0.    From Alice Rearden: “Traditionally, Yup’ik men would take ‘fire baths’ in the qasgi, the community house where men lived. There were fire pits in the center and no rocks on them. Later on, people started building the more modern steam baths that have an oil barrel made of metal. They put rocks on top that you splash water on in order to get the steam.” Though the Yup’ik steam bath is similar in function to sweat lodges used in other North American Indigenous communities, it is also culturally distinct.

0.    I use 2020 census numbers here, rather than estimating the 2015 population, though the population grew some in the intervening five years.

0.    This kind of discrimination occurred nationwide. According to Nikole Hannah-Jones, writing in the New York Times Magazine, “As part of the New Deal programs, the federal government created redlining maps, marking neighborhoods where Black people lived in red ink to denote that they were uninsurable. As a result, 98 percent of the loans the Federal Housing Administration insured from 1934 to 1962 went to white Americans, locking nearly all Black Americans out of the government program credited with building the modern (white) middle class.”

0.    Despite often feeling excluded from the mainstream environmental community, in study after study, Black Americans and Latinx respondents consistently are more concerned about climate change than whites. In a 2009 poll, 57 percent of voters of color felt global warming was very or extremely serious, compared to just 39 percent of whites. The pattern has held over time. In a survey more than a decade later, less than half of whites said they’re alarmed or concerned about climate change, compared to more than two-thirds of Latinx respondents and 57 percent of Black Americans. People of color also expressed more willingness to participate in environmental activism.

0.    “The income disparity between rich and poor is so great that [in 2015] Bloomberg declared New Orleans the country’s most ‘unequal’ city,” writes Gary Rivlin, author of Katrina: After the Flood. “And it’s hardly just the poor who are suffering. The median Black household income in New Orleans in 2013 was $30,000—$5,000 less than it was in 2000, adjusted for inflation. By contrast, median household income in the white community increased by 40 percent over that same period and now stands at more than $60,000.”

0.    Regulatory violations have been almost routine across the refining sector, and the industry often fights back when regulators try to hold it accountable. According to an extensive 2011 investigation by the Center for Public Integrity, “Regulators have little sway over refineries. Between 2000 and mid-2010, refinery owners contested 53 percent of all violations cited by state or federal safety inspectors, allowing companies to put off improvements and save money. On average, some twenty months pass before a contested case is closed. No other industry with more than a thousand violations appeals such a large proportion of findings.”

0.    In the November 2021 mayoral election, Carlene Anders lost to another candidate. It was, however, not a bitter campaign, and her opponent praised Carlene for working “long and hard towards the recovery efforts after the fires” and dedicating “countless hours helping those who lost their homes try to find housing or rebuild.”

0.    Even before climate change, the uprooting of Black Americans and other communities of color has been a frequent pattern in America. In the rural South, for instance, discrimination in property law, lending, disaster assistance, and real estate practices ultimately forced 95 percent of rural Black farmers off their land over the last century.

0.    I am simplifying and narrowing this discussion of neoliberalism to how it affects concepts of place and home. But many volumes have been written about why this ideology is dangerous and antithetical to addressing climate change, protecting democracy, and preserving much of anything for the public good. Naomi Klein’s works, especially This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine, describe the flaws of neoliberalism in great detail.

0.    Chinese American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan came up with a similar concept in 1990 called topophilia, “the affective bond between people and place.” But while Tuan’s word remains in the realm of pure emotion, Albrecht’s soliphilia tries to capture the additional sense that the love of place could motivate people to take action.

0.    Later that year, Jenny Wolfe would leave her city government role to take a position with an architecture firm focused on cultural preservation but would remain in St. Augustine, still devoting her energy to protecting historic sites from threats such as flooding.

0.    There are those, such as Elon Musk, who believe that to escape climate change, we need to set up a new human society on, say, Mars. But as Bill McKibben points out, “The single most inhospitable cubic meter of the Earth’s surface—some waste of Saharan sand, some rocky Himalayan outcrop—is a thousand times more hospitable than the most appealing corner of Mars or Jupiter.” Currently, there are no other planets within our reach that can sustain human life over a long period of time. In spite of fanciful, science-fictional ideas that might suggest otherwise, any future scenario that sends human refugees fleeing an uninhabitable Earth is likely to be brutal.

0.    Such irrigation systems exist in a number of places that were influenced by Spanish culture, including the acequias of the American Southwest. These sophisticated, centuries-old networks of irrigation channels are some of the most interesting examples of technology shared across human cultures, developed in the Middle East thousands of years ago, borrowed by the Spanish, brought to North America by Spanish Catholic missionaries. Indigenous communities such as the Pueblo had independently developed similar water systems and integrated the methods of acequia maintenance into their own land management practices. Today acequias are still communally managed in northern New Mexico, are considered a vital part of Indigenous culture in the region, and are recognized as governmental units under New Mexico law.

0.    Naomi Klein writes in On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, “The reality is that Soviet-era state socialism was a disaster for the climate. It devoured resources with as much enthusiasm as capitalism, and spewed waste just as recklessly.… And while some point to the dizzying expansion of China’s renewable energy programs to argue that only centrally controlled regimes can get the green job done, China’s command-and-control economy continues to be harnessed to wage an all-out war with nature, through massively disruptive mega-dams, superhighways, and extraction-based energy projects, particularly coal.”

0.    In 2015, the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News published a detailed series of investigations revealing that Exxon and other major oil companies conducted their own sophisticated scientific research on climate change in the 1970s and 1980s, then deliberately buried their findings. “Exxon documents show that top corporate managers were aware of their scientists’ early conclusions about carbon dioxide’s impact on the climate,” three reporters for Inside Climate News wrote. “They reveal that scientists warned management that policy changes to address climate change might affect profitability. After a decade of frank internal discussions on global warming and conducting unbiased studies on it, Exxon changed direction in 1989 and spent more than 20 years discrediting the research its own scientists had once confirmed.” These investigations have led to a series of ongoing lawsuits accusing Exxon of misleading the public and shareholders.

0.    There is some debate about both the origins of the word Eskimo and whether it is an acceptable term for Alaska Natives and other arctic and subarctic peoples. Linguists at the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks believe the word comes from the Montagnais (Innu) word ayaÃkimew and means “netter of snowshoes.” Archaeologists still use Paleo-Eskimo as a technical term for some of the earliest human inhabitants of the Arctic. The people of Newtok commonly refer to “Eskimo food” and “Eskimo dancing,” and those whom I asked said they consider the word unproblematic. But other sources suggest Eskimo is derogatory or at very least a colonizer’s word. I use it here only in reference to common phrases spoken by Newtok residents.

0.    Sadly, Newtok was not able to keep the pandemic out forever, and, in August 2021, the community reported thirty-two cases of Covid.

0.    This foundation—then the Richmond Community Foundation and now named RCF Connects—has in at least one case accepted funding from Chevron. In 2014, Chevron chose RCF Connects to lead an economic development initiative.

0.    Since 2009, students at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism have run a news lab called Richmond Confidential to report on events in the city. Over the years, RC reporters have done deep investigations into Chevron and Richmond politics, and the most detailed account of the August 7 meeting comes from RC. Some details that appear here are drawn from RC ’s reporting and from KQED, regional public radio.

0.    In 2020, according to the Othering and Belonging Institute, Chevron taxes made up nearly 24 percent of the city’s general fund revenue. However, the company has disputed city efforts to raise its taxes and also pays below-market property taxes, a real estate tax break enshrined in a 1970s-era California law.

0.    Harvard University historians Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes have also documented oil companies’ strategies for misleading the public. Oreskes described her findings in a congressional committee hearing in 2019: “Rather than accept the science and alter its business model accordingly, [the industry] made the fateful decision to fight the facts. For more than thirty years, the fossil fuel industry and its allies have denied the truth about anthropogenic global warming. They have systematically misled the American people, and contributed to delay in acting on the issue, by discounted [sic] and disparaging climate science, mispresenting scientific findings, and attempting to discredit climate scientists,” through misleading advertisements, by funding third-party groups that produce propaganda, by supporting trade associations that run climate-denialist media campaigns, by attacking scientists directly, and by lobbying against regulations.

0.    In 2014, a U.S. judge declared the Ecuadoran court’s decision against Chevron invalid. Donziger was found guilty and sentenced to house arrest, a ruling that was contested by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, which called for an investigation. In 2020, twenty-nine Nobel laureates wrote an open letter accusing Chevron of harassing and defaming the lawyer. In 2021, Donziger was also found guilty of criminal contempt of court.

0.    The price of oil, of course, rebounded in 2021 and soared in 2022. “But that doesn’t mean that everything went back to where it was before,” Juhasz told me in early 2022. “There is a very urgent push in a growing number of communities to break free of fossil fuels. You have to put in place the policies that allow you to shift.” Moreover, the fossil fuel industry remains inherently volatile, and the movement to divest continues to grow.