How to Save a Forest

“If you look really closely, the grand fir is dying,” said Ray Entz, who directs the Kalispel tribe’s Department of Natural Resources. I was trailing him in northeastern Washington through their Indian Creek Community Forest, where a few of the trees had faded from evergreen to an aged burgundy red, a sign that they would soon be joining their lost brethren, brittle and fallen on the carpet of dried pine needles. “That’s a climate reaction,” he explained. Summer droughts, coupled with exceptionally soggy springs, had created an ideal environment for laminated root rot, a fungus that was wiping them off the landscape. “We are losing that tree from our understory”—the plant life beneath a forest’s canopy—“at a fast pace.”

Entz pulled out his phone to show me a video he had shot a couple of weeks earlier on a nearby patch of US Forest Service land that bordered a private parcel owned by Stimson Lumber, one of the biggest timberland owners in the West. A legion of Douglas firs, leaning and teetering, drunken giants toppling every which way, a few entirely collapsed onto the ground. A sordid, debaucherous scene. “It looked like a war zone,” he recalled.

I inhaled the aroma of pine. All the Douglas fir around me were probably infected.

“I had somebody say, ‘Oh, climate change won’t affect things for decades or even 100 years,’” said Entz. Yet these changes had all appeared in just the last six years. “I said, ‘Well, let’s go out in the forest right now.’”

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The Indian Creek Community Forest is the creation of Entz’s Department of Natural Resources, established by the tribe in 1992 to restore and conserve the environments at the heart of the Kalispel people’s cultural lifeways. Their territory once stretched 200 miles along the Pend Oreille River into Montana and Canada. Refusing to cede their lands, they watched settlers chip at them through the Homestead Act. By 1875, only 395 Kalispel people remained. From their 5,000-acre reservation, the survivors watched their shorelines erode, wildlife habitats flood, and native fish—trout, salmon—disappear, thanks to a 20th-century federal program to “reclaim” the arid West for cities and farms, rerouting networks of waterways through hundreds of reservoirs and dams.

A century later, America realized it had erred. The dams weren’t supplying enough power. Local fish species were now covered by the Endangered Species Act, and Native activists were making a lot of noise about historical dispossession and genocide. So the federal government gave the Kalispel some money to mitigate the wildlife damage. The tribe hired an entry-level biologist, Entz, and three others to create the Department of Natural Resources. Then the department started buying land: 5,500 acres since 1992, more than doubling the tribe’s land base, and increasing tribal access “for hunting, gathering, open space, being Kalispel,” Entz explained. Along with new parcels, housing, and economic development, the tribe now holds over 11,000 acres.

The Kalispel are ministering to the forest and treating its failing health. Yet with only around 700 enrolled members, “we’re a small tribe with a small reservation,” so it was also critical to restore and conserve the surrounding public and private parcels, hoping that the benefits will “spill onto the reservation,” he said. “A rising tide lifts all boats.” It’s why navigating the complex local checkerboard of federal, state, private, and nonprofit lands is one of the Department of Natural Resources’ notable strengths.

I visited in October 2021, and a shrill squawk pierced the curtain of wood. “Turkeys,” Entz grimaced. “I hate them.” Invasive species introduced from the East and Midwest, wild turkeys compete with deer and native grouse for food. “They’re like little velociraptors.”

As Entz explained the root rot, I imagined fungi creeping across property lines, turkeys barging in. It’s comforting to imagine a world made orderly and rational by drawing straight lines on a map to represent borders and property boundaries. Yet among the millions of species on Earth, only humans revere them.

The Indian Creek Community Forest sits on 410 acres, with a native plant nursery for tribal members to pick up seedlings, a pond for them to catch rainbow trout, and a half-mile interpretative trail that’s now a field trip destination for local public schools. On a section with no wildlife habitats, the tribe will build eight new homes. A stargazers’ club from the surrounding community gathers on its hills, storing their telescopes on-site.

Its creation was supported by National Park Service and US Forest Service programs to give communities more tailor-made access to the outdoors, right in their own backyards. It’s an implicit, unspoken acknowledgment that America’s vast public lands are not always accessible to the people they are meant to serve.

The Forest Service provided $350,000 to help purchase the land. Indian Creek was one of the first beneficiaries, in 2012, of its community forest program to help tribes, nonprofits, and local governments buy forestland that is threatened and then conserve it and use it for the community’s benefit. Candice Polisky, the program’s regional coordinator, told me that it was also intended to give local people access to open space and some control over land management, including wetland restoration, recreation, or fire suppression.

Indian Creek was then designed by the local community—both tribal and non-Native—with the National Park Service organizing a barbecue and workshops to brainstorm and solicit ideas. (A counterpart to the gran- diose national parks it runs, the agency’s Rivers, Trails, and Conservation Assistance Program helps nonprofits, groups, and tribes create public recreation opportunities close to home.)

Also, the forest includes a demonstration site for small forest landowners to see the effects of nine different techniques for maintaining a healthy forest, from hand-thinning and machine mastication to prescribed burns. The latter—fighting fire with fire—was widely used in this region until the settlers arrived.

Architects from Washington State University’s landscape architecture program then took the ideas and, pro bono, made conceptual designs for parts of the forest, while graphic design students from Eastern Washington University helped create the signage for the trails. Stephanie Stroud, the National Park Service community planner who ran the community engagement effort, took notice of the tribe’s inclusive stance. “The Kalispel Tribe, I think, is so successful because they integrate themselves with the surrounding community,” she told me. “They have this amazing resource, this asset, and they welcome the community into it.”

As we walked through the forest of towering pines, I asked how the Kalispel’s Salish ancestors might have used this land.

Mike Lithgow, the department’s outreach coordinator, pointed down the slope from the forest to the mouth of a creek, an archeological site called the Place of Many Bones. A village or campsite stood right where the fish go to spawn, a bounty for fishing, but sometime in the last 500 years, it was decimated by influenza or chicken pox—European diseases.

The forest we stood in was likely a “hunting and gathering management area,” speculated Entz. “At the end of the year, when they were done collecting berries, done hunting, the last guy out: light a match, manage the forest.”

This would have kept the forest more open. Without trees crowding the understory, sunlight would caress the soil, producing a richer forest ecosystem of huckleberries and medicinal plants for humans, and grasses and shrubs for the deer they hunted. Charcoal, left behind when fires don’t grow too intense, sequester carbon, enrich the soil, and help it retain water. But European settlers believed in suppressing fire and leaving the wilderness untouched.

Forestland managers are beginning to see the wisdom of these ways. Yet the legacy of slashed public-lands budgets and staff have left the nation’s largest forestland manager, the US Forest Service, unable to actively manage its 193 million acres. (Its staff has more than halved since 1992.) On the flip side, environmentalists have also blocked attempts to sell off Forest Service properties, knowing that big timber companies and real estate developers will snap them up. Paradoxically, this has trapped the forests with an owner who lacks the means to care for their health.

In 2015, wildfires torched at least 18,500 acres in the region, stopping just shy of the reservation border, the largest wildfire in the memories of tribal members at the time. The tribe questioned if they were doing enough with their neighbors to protect the reservation.

“I said no,” Entz recounted. “But we have a tool.”

The Tribal Forest Protection Act requires the federal government to consider tribal proposals to manage forest health on Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands bordering reservations. Entz’s department did just this, and three years after the fire, the Forest Service adopted their Sxwuytn Project—Sxwuytn means “trail” in Salish—to return forests to a more natural state.

There in a clearing among the pines, I asked how he would achieve this. Entz glanced around. If a fire crept to this patch of forest today, it would burn every tree, he explained. Flames would first consume the grass and carpet of pine needles, then leap up to the grand and Douglas firs—the trees that thrive at medium height in the shade and crowd the understory. Flames could easily hop between them, then up past the long, bare legs of the ponderosas, licking their leafy crowns and torching them.

So Entz would get rid of some of the firs. Without them, the charcoal of barbecued grasses and shrubs would barely damage the ponderosas. These leggy pines are protected by a thick bark resembling interlocked puzzle pieces, which pop off when they’re singed like dried-up scabs. The fires would lose a stepping stone toward the sky. Also, prescribing regular burns would keep the fir-eating fungi, the root rot, at bay.

But carrying this out across the Sxwuytn area is a whole other matter. The 97,000 acres include most of the Kalispel reservation, state lands, and the Colville National Forest. In the sickly woods around the Browns Lake Campground, the Forest Service contracted Entz’s staff to saw down diseased and dying trees, restore the health of the forest, and build a heritage interpretation trail sharing tribal knowledge of the bull and cutthroat trout. By late 2023, they were planning a prescribed burn across state and tribal lands, the first cross-boundary burn with the state in Entz’s memory. The hope of Sxwuytn was for the Forest Service to enlist the tribe on federal lands, cutting down species that risk disease, seeding legacy trees (like lodgepole pines), and prescribing burns that will cull much of the younger growth. Lodgepoles, ponderosas, larches, and cedars would dominate. Some grand and Douglas firs would remain, but the thick understory of young trees will be gone, allowing one big tree to survive.

Entz’s department knows how to do this because they treat their own lands this way, a couple of hundred acres at a time, before moving onto another patch, all on a 15-, 20-, or 30-year cycle. They are also experienced in working with private landowners, who hold 41 percent of the Sxwuytn area and are encouraged, though not required, to participate.

Polisky told me that the mix properties, each with a different owner, is one of the biggest barriers to a community’s control over land management and that the community forest program aims to address this by helping communities buy conservation land. She sees the Kalispel as a model for working around these fragmented landscapes. “At every single juncture, I think to myself that they have worked across ownership,” she said.

The night before I visited, Entz and his staff spoke to property owners along Harvey Creek, an area north of the reservation (but not within the Sxwuytn area), where the department bought a parcel to restore a bull-trout spawning ground and reconnect the waterway to a lake. The Kalispel Tribe needed permission to access these private lands to do the work, but the owners were skeptical. Was the tribe some “crazy environmental group that’s going to take away their property rights?” Entz recalled.

“Once we’re done, we’re out,” he told them. In fact, the process would be far less invasive than a pipeline easement that gives a company access to the land for decades. Plus, the restoration, unlike a pipeline, would add value to their property. By late 2023, the landowners seemed to be coming around.

In an ideal world, Entz said he would “create a larger connected land base for our tribal membership and the community and protect it from further development and subdivision.” Such a vision stokes fears among outsiders that the Kalispel are trying to take over and kick everyone out. But unlike the community forest, private lands are already closed, including the vast local tracts owned by railroad and timber corporations. The tribe, by contrast, allows non-tribal people to hunt ducks on some of their lands, and hopes to create even more opportunities for their neighbors. “I’m kind of hoping that someday, I can get a turkey program,” he added. “Because I’d like to get rid of some turkeys.”

In fact, the real threat to the lands was coming from another direction. Entz pointed up a slope from the entrance of Indian Creek. The Kalispel Tribe had tried to buy a 1,200-acre forest property that was up for sale, but “we just couldn’t pull the trigger.” A developer swooped in for the purchase and sliced it into 20 parcels to build new homes. Each will likely have its own driveway, sewer, and power connections, and probably a pet dog—“wildlife intrusions,” as he called them. “More homes in the exurban forest environment, which are now susceptible to wildfire,” place “an extraordinary strain on county infrastructure,” including the fire department, he said.

Real-estate prices had shot up in the previous year. Entz was observing an “amazing amount” of forest conversion, trees clear-cut to make way for farms or development. “It’s a little disturbing,” he remarked, “but it’s just our new reality.”

I rode with Entz and Lithgow as we traversed the reservation, tracing the Pend Oreille, its waters sparkling against the mossy green of the forested slopes. Bundles of brown fur dotted a field by the road—the tribe’s bison herd, populated in 1973 by a starter herd from the Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. The species are not native to Washington State, and the Kalispel people once traveled to the territory of the Bitterroot Salish—now the Flathead tribe in Montana—to hunt them. Nevertheless, the herd was thriving in their new home.

Ten minutes later, we pulled into a nondescript property where it all began: the 460-acre Flying Goose Ranch that the federal government bought on their behalf in 1993. “It was beat,” Entz recalled. Cows had eaten everything six feet above ground, and “there was not a leaf on a bush.” The field was strewn with the bones of discarded cars, farm implements, bed rails repurposed as fences, tires, and trash. “That was my very first crack at wetland floodplain restoration.” Lying on the northern border of the reservation, they placed the parcel into trust in 1997.

We rolled across the pasture toward the cottonwood forest they had restored on the riverbank, reconnecting the land to a floodplain. Even after years of drought, the grass was dense and scruffy, and the wetland pasture and forest were a rich habitat for eagles, deer, beaver, warblers, and muskrat. “It’s really a strong winter range, and it’s a strong fawning, calving area in the spring,” Entz explained.

I nodded. Somehow, this tribe, with a population smaller than my Brooklyn block, had become one of the region’s foremost wetland forest doctors. To do this, they had learned to navigate the multitude of relationships defining the property checkerboard—relationships with conservative landowners, progressive land trusts, federal agencies, and varying levels of government. But as long as our society continues adding fuel to the climate crisis, they are perpetually scrambling just to catch up.

Stationed ahead, right where pasture meets forest, a white-tailed deer watched us approach, body plump, coat smooth. “That is one healthy doe,” remarked Entz.

We crawled forward, and she stood her ground.

“Well, she’s probably got a fawn somewhere in here,” he speculated. We stopped a foot away. Practically frozen, she was like a Buckingham Palace guard.

Trudging through the grass to the front of the car, Lithgow pulled out his phone. Click. Click. Click. Then he paused. “Her nose is dripping!” I could see it now, and the drooling too.

“I wonder if she did contract bluetongue,” muttered Entz.

What was bluetongue?

Entz explained that it is a virus the deer get from gnats—either that or it was another similar virus, EHD, epizootic hemorrhagic disease. Outbreaks were usually worse during droughts, when the deer wander down to the river on mudflats that are typically covered by water. The gnats emerge, latch on, cover their bodies.

“They had a huge die-off over there,” he said, gesturing way beyond the river. “I thought we would escape it just because we have the river and some extra water.”

Nudging the Jeep forward, the bumper finally grazed her rear.

One swift leap, a spring through the air, and she vanished into the forest. Graceful and unnerving, she was like an enigmatic spirit creature from a Hayao Miyazaki film.

I asked if she would die.

“She might make it.” Entz shrugged. “You never know.”

Stopping in front of the intake facility pumping river water up, we jumped out. Entz wanted to show me the rainbow-trout hatchery that supplies the Indian Creek fishing pond. Following him through tall grasses, down toward the water, I admired the soft curves of the mountains rolling beyond the opposite bank. Then he stopped. “Yep, we got an EHD outbreak.”

Ten feet from the water, the body of a chubby white-tailed deer lay toppled in the grass, her white belly soft. Eyes wide open but dull like felt, a dried red foam oozed from her nose.

“That one was pretty healthy too,” he remarked, peering down at her face. “She hasn’t been dead more than a day.”

“The other one’s not gonna make it,” concluded Lithgow.

They told me that the virus tears the animals apart from the inside: internal bleeding, lungs and liver hemorrhaging, capillaries and blood vessels falling apart. They wanted to get the word out to other landowners that it had appeared, maybe through the local 4-H club.

“Well, we didn’t escape it,” sighed Entz. “We usually do.”

The area was not typically affected by drought. On this Flying Goose Ranch, the department had even expanded the wetland, removing the old drains and letting the water flow back. But despite the grasses and shrubs that sprang forth from the mudflat, and the robust cottonwood forest now cleaving pasture and river, bigger forces are unsettling the environment.

“The drought was pretty severe,” said Entz. The viruses are “garbage that just floats up.”

I stared at the deer, weighing the serenity of dying before the clear rushing water, with the indignity of strangers happening upon your corpse.

I averted my eyes.

“Is this a climate thing?” I asked. “Yes,” replied Entz. “You’re gonna see more of this.”

In late May, as the national uprising against police brutality forced on America a crash course in “defunding” and “abolishing” the police, another concept also began circulating: “community control.”

This likely drew a few blank stares, and not without reason: “Community control” sounds utopian, even in a federalist country like ours that leaves great autonomy to the states. But it’s not a new idea, and it’s not only relevant to our current crisis of a law enforcement regime unaccountable to the people it polices. Community control proposes that the institutions people depend upon should be controlled by community members working in cooperation, not private individuals, corporate shareholders, or government bureaucrats.

“We’ve known for decades that the things that our communities really need to be healthy and safe not only aren’t being invested in, but are actually being starved of resources,” said Monifa Bandele of the Movement for Black Lives Policy Table. That’s why the Movement for Black Lives has made community control a key plank in its Vision for Black Lives platform, demanding community control of the “laws, institutions, and policies that are meant to serve us—from our schools to our local budgets, economies, police departments, and our land.”

To begin building community control in the 21st century, activists can look to experiments dating back centuries that have attempted to address systemic inequality and build Black power across different areas of American life, including land, work, education, and law enforcement. Successive Black freedom movements have advocated or enacted versions of community control, from the Abolitionists through the civil rights era, the New Left and the Black Power movement.

Examining key experiments in community control from the not-so-distant past—one that attempted to build power outside existing institutions, and one that aimed squarely at the structures standing in the way of Black empowerment—reveals both its potential as a tool for abolishing systemic racism and the challenges the model faces for enacting transformative change. These reflect the larger question that motivated the earlier experiments: How to end systemic racism when it is baked into every crumb of American life?

he idea, if not the reality, of direct, democratic control over the institutions that shape our lives was present at our country’s founding. Despite the varied inspirations for community control in the United States—British socialism, utopian communes, intentional communities—“the most important of these is the history of black ‘organized communities’ of the nineteenth century,” political scientist James DeFilippis writes in Unmaking Goliath: Community Control in the Face of Global Capital. These trailblazing efforts emerged at a time of great discrimination and oppression in order to pool the limited resources of individuals toward collective aims: surviving slavery, racial violence, discrimination, and poverty, as the political economist Jessica Gordon Nembhard describes in Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice.

Until the end of the Civil War, Black fugitive slaves ran communes where they educated themselves, made a living, managed communal farms, and organized abolitionist resistance along the Underground Railroad. Black urban communities collected dues from members to establish their own schools, health benefits, and social welfare. Turning inward and working together, these organizations were born of necessity, and similar mutual aid efforts have also emerged in other communities neglected and targeted by racist society, such as Chinese and Mexican immigrants in the 19th and 20th century.

The early Black cooperative organizations became a springboard for cooperative businesses and trade unions, as W.E.B. Du Bois observed in 1907. He argued that maintaining economic self-sufficiency through collective ownership and control was essential for Black people—and all Americans—to achieve racial equality in a society defined by white supremacy, and a fundamentally unequal economic system. Cooperation would “weld the majority of our people into an impregnable, economic phalanx,” he wrote in 1933.

But by the 1960s, it was obvious that America still wasn’t meeting the basic needs of Black Americans. In 1968, a global influenza was killing 100,000 in the United States, cities across the country were roiled with mass disturbances following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and Richard Nixon was riding a wave of pent-up white rage to the White House. In this volatile climate, the civil rights, Black Power, and New Left movements revisited the notion that cooperation, collective ownership, and community governance could give poor, marginalized people more control of their lives, and by extension, more power.

In Southwest Georgia, civil rights activists had been registering Albany’s Black voters and organizing sit-ins, boycotts, mass meetings, and demonstrations against the city’s segregated bus stations through the ’60s, but by decade’s end, they hadn’t yielded many concrete improvements in Black people’s standard of living. The activists began building islands of Black self-determination to strengthen their position within the seas of white supremacy. “We were trying to organize people in the rural area, and we knew the struggle,” one of the activists, Shirley Sherrod, told me for a story I reported for Harper’s Magazine.

The Black community lacked wealth, and farming is hard, low-paying, capital-intensive work. It was even more difficult for Black farmers who were discriminated against by banks, the USDA, and other institutions. Waves of Black farmers lost their land and went out of business during this era, as the historian Pete Daniel describes in Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights. Sherrod knew that racial equality would remain elusive so long as Black people lacked economic clout and stability. In 1968, after visiting Israel to study different land communities, Albany’s civil rights activists began a cooperative venture on collectively owned land. “We were thinking that we would develop something so that we would never lose the land,” Sherrod said.

New Communities, a Black-led, multiracial cooperative farm, broke ground in 1969 on 6,000 acres of land near Albany. It is widely considered to be the first Community Land Trust, a model of landholding that places the land in a trust that is governed by a board of community members, managed by a nonprofit, and used for whatever the community chooses, whether that’s housing, small businesses, cultural spaces, gardens, parks, or farms. Maximizing the community’s resources and spreading the risks across the collective, community control of land ensures that the land remains in the community—and for the community—beyond the lifespan, efforts, whims, or fate of any one individual. New Communities was then the largest tract of Black-owned land in the United States.

This was not an “intentional community,” those enclaves of like-minded individuals that were popular in the ’60s. Enmeshed in the civil rights movement, collective ownership and control was a way to buttress the economic power of its members. Collectively, they grew soybeans, peanuts, corn, peas, strawberries, collard greens, okra, and eight acres of muscadine grapes. They sold some of it in the New Communities store, along with syrup they made from their own sugarcane, and ham, bacon and sausage they cured in their own smokehouse, from the hundreds of hogs they raised. “You can sustain better because it’s a group thing,” said Gerald Holley, the resident storekeeper and meat-smoker, who later ran his own shoe business. “It’s not an individual company—one man holding up the company.”

The collective spirit of New Communities also protected them against the hostility of their white neighbors. “They didn’t want to see the new community succeed,” Holley told me, but the white racists still bought cigarettes and gas from their store. But they were still a relatively small Black-run outfit in a hostile white-run state. In 1969, the government reneged on a grant they had promised to help New Communities buy the land—Sherrod believes they caved to white opposition—and the farmers were forced to take out a private loan. When severe droughts began in 1981, the USDA denied them a loan to install irrigation, despite approving nearby white farmers for similar financing—part of a pattern of racial discrimination that became the focus of Pigford vs. Glickman, the Supreme Court case that produced the largest civil rights settlements in US history. Within their 6,000 acres, New Communities farmers had achieved a measure of autonomy that might’ve eluded them as individuals, but their island wasn’t completely protected from the whims of the wider world. Unable to pay their mortgage, they foreclosed in 1985.

As an experiment in building power apart from existing institutions, New Communities shows the often-insurmountable barriers such efforts at self-determination face. But it has proved even more difficult to establish community control over existing institutions head-on. Following Brown vs. Board of Education, New York City failed to integrate its public schools: Black children bused into white neighborhoods were greeted with fierce white opposition, schools in Black and brown neighborhoods were overcrowded and underfunded, and the mostly white teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, blocked efforts to encourage the best teachers to take assignments there. Parents also saw the mostly white teachers and principals—only 1 percent of principals and 8 percent of teachers in the city’s schools were Black—punishing their children for being “disruptive,” rather than treating them with patience, empathy, and care. So instead of waiting for complacent white politicians and administrators to change the system, they began seeking a more formal role in hiring, firing, and day-to-day management of their schools.

Their organizing worked. In 1967, the city set up three experimental “community control” school districts: one in Harlem, one in lower Manhattan, and one in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, a Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood in Central Brooklyn. Under “community control,” parents in each district elected a governing board that could hire superintendents and principals, decentralizing powers once concentrated in the Board of Education. Though supported by the city’s liberal elites and shaped by the Ford Foundation—community control would boost the self-esteem and boot-strapping capacities of Black people without threatening the power of white communities, they thought—the plan soon drew the ire of the UFT. It threatened their control over the city’s schools, including a contract clause they were seeking from the Board of Education to allow teachers to remove “disruptive” children from schools. So in May 1968, when the Ocean Hill–Brownsville community control board transferred 19 teachers and administrators out of their district, claiming they were hostile to community control, the UFT objected. And when classes started in September, the union called a citywide teacher strike, shutting down all of New York City’s public schools for ten weeks.

The events stoked deep, long-lasting racial divisions in New York City and America’s progressive movements. For the UFT, the community’s reaction to the strike was just “union-busting.” In Ocean Hill–Brownsville, the multiracial teaching staff—hired by the community control board, and backed by Black and brown parents, the Ocean Hill–Brownsville community, civil rights leaders, and the Afro-American Teachers Association—crossed the picket line each day to keep their schools open. The daily spectacle of activists, community members, journalists, and police became a flashpoint of racial tensions in the city, as New York’s white middle-class rallied around the union, and Black and brown New Yorkers coalesced around Ocean Hill–Brownsville leaders. But the UFT didn’t let up. Only once the city reinstated the transferred teachers and ended the community control experiment in mid-November was the strike called off.

For the Black Power movement, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville struggle was yet another instance of a progressive white institution reversing course on its civil rights commitments the moment it meant giving up any power. Echoes of “community control” still exist, if watered-down, in the city’s school districts—in 1969, New York State passed a UFT-backed decentralization bill that created 30 new elected school boards without giving them much control. But for Mark Winston Griffith, cohost of School Colors, a podcast that examines the afterlives of Ocean Hill–Brownsville, and an organizer who has helped to launch a community-controlled bank and grocery store in Central Brooklyn, Ocean Hill–Brownsville also highlighted the immense challenges of establishing “community control”—and negotiating varied, sometimes-clashing aims—within large, diverse communities.

It’s a challenge that any community control experiment will face in taking on an entrenched institution. Powerful white opposition can quash any new community control experiment, as it did to New Communities and Ocean Hill–Brownsville. Governments and institutions can co-opt community control rhetoric or structures without redistributing real power to the people, like the 1969 decentralization law.

Yet New Communities was also an unlikely success. After its end, Shirley Sherrod spent two decades assisting countless black farmers through the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, a nonprofit association of Black farmers and cooperatives founded in 1967. Under Obama, she became the USDA’s first black rural development director in Georgia—a radical shift for the agency she once sued. (Sherrod was infamously forced from her position at the USDA after the Obama administration caved to outcry over a doctored video clip. When the full clip was made public, the USDA offered Sherrod a new job, which she declined).

Also, New Communities birthed a new model of landholding that other communities continue to modify, strengthen, and adapt. Two hundred and sixty CLTs are thriving in the United States today, meaning that the experiment never truly ended.

n a way, the current push for community control over police is an amalgam of the inside-outside approaches: defunding police departments—targeting an existing institution that is harming Black communities—allows people to build their own institutions to meet their needs. “Control is essential to our platform, because that’s about self-determination,” the Movement for Black Lives’ Bandele explains. “If you don’t control the institutions that are critical to your life, to your existence, then you cannot survive. You can’t thrive.”

Activists are divided on the real meaning of community control when it comes to law enforcement, and how such control would relate to the calls to “defund” or “abolish” the police. In 1971, the city of Berkeley voted down the Black Panther Party’s program for “community control of police,” which proposed the formation of elected civilian review boards to investigate police shootings, in a referendum. This version of “community control of police” remains the most well-known, and civilian review boards have been criticized by the “abolish” camp as largely symbolic, vulnerable to cooptation by pro-police interests, and attempting to tweak a fundamentally oppressive institution without giving the people any real control.

But it’s not the only program. After the Ferguson uprising in 2014, Max Rameau and his Pan-African Community Action (PACA) began formulating a proposal for Community Control of Police that has since become a central campaign of the National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression. It proposes a directly elected, all-civilian council with full or final authority—not just the right to offer input—over police policy, budgets, disciplinary measures, hiring and firing (including of the police chief), full access to all investigations, and negotiations with police unions. By granting real power over these essential functions to the civilian council, communities can choose to completely overhaul—to abolish and remake—their police. What’s missing from this brief, skeletal proposal are answers to the litany of questions that people often raise: How will communities handle violence? Can I send my children to the playground and expect them to return unscathed? How do we deal with the barrage of fireworks exploding through the night on our block?

“We need you to reimagine public safety in your community”—Rameau and PACA give this directive to communities they engage on the proposal. It’s a prompt for people to figure out what safety would mean outside of a world that only knows to punish people for social violations, and an indication that this program might be more accurately described as “community control of public safety.” “Imagine that you have 100 organizers. They all have cars. They have walkie-talkies. They could have guns. They don’t have to have them, but they could have them. It’s up to you,” he continues. “They’re all wearing uniforms. You know who they are. How would you use them to improve your community?”

No one ever suggests catching truant kids and putting them in jail, he reports. No one says they need military-grade weapons or tanks. Most envision safety and security as someone picking up elderly people from the supermarket in the winter, so they’re not waiting for the bus in the cold, or someone finding out why a homeless person is on the street, and then helping them to address the root cause.

These answers still leave conspicuous blank spaces in the same spots where our collective imaginations usually fail, but the point of sticking with the exercise is to fill them in. “We have good answers for why you shouldn’t call the police,” Rameau says. Namely, that they are instruments of terror for poor communities, even if they are also sometimes protectors. “But we don’t have an answer for what to do when something’s legitimately happening to you, and you need some help and support. And we need to build that,” he said. “We need to get people to a viable alternative.”

That is what New Communities created: not just a commitment to reimagine the world but an actual model that, despite its limitations, has allowed hundreds of communities to fill in the blanks, improve on the model, and collectively build a different system for the nation, one plot at a time. “I’m not opposed to the idea of defunding,” said Rameau. Defunding is a crucial step to achieving public safety, but in the era of New Communities and Ocean Hill-Brownsville, police budgets were half what they are today, and police were still “abusive because of who held the power,” he said. Yet power is the reason Rameau doesn’t use the term “abolition,” even if his end goal sounds suspiciously abolitionist: a system of public safety controlled by the people most brutalized and oppressed by police today, and so radically different from existing police that it shouldn’t be called “police.” “The real question is: ‘Has power shifted?’”

One thing hasn’t changed since the late ’60s, or even the 19th century: power remains concentrated in America’s wealthy white communities. But since that era, proponents of neoliberalism have also steadily strengthened the power of corporations, at the expense of collective and public institutions. Prisons have been privatized. The private security industry is ballooning, globally and in the United States, with bodyguards and private patrols protecting shopping malls, luxury hotels, gated communities, and the 1 percent. Without a viable alternative like the one Rameau seeks, it’s not hard to imagine this industry absorbing the functions of public police, but with less accountability, fewer restrictions, and, by extension, more brutality. “Walmart is not going to say, ‘Well, there’s no police here, I guess we’ll take whatever losses come.’”

The divergence between “community control of public safety” and “abolition” seems to reflect the same question that animated the movements of the late ’60s: Do we get to our goal—a world structured by principles of justice—by targeting, outwardly, the oppressive system, or by building our own power and, through it, our own alternative? Yet if there’s a lesson to draw from the earlier community control experiments, it is that each approach also requires the other. Decentralization, a goal shared by right-wing libertarians, leaves intact the seas of white supremacy, while “community control” mechanisms, like civilian boards, risk being corrupted or co-opted by reformist agendas. If “abolish” doesn’t carry this risk, that’s because it doesn’t offer a formal alternative—a proposed roadmap, how ever imperfect, that doesn’t just lead away from injustice, but toward a more fair society.

With no models of community-controlled public safety at a large scale in the United States, we are ultimately limited by the road maps we create. “We want to be visionary and think about things that can and should work,” says Rameau. “Not to say, ‘We’re going to limit ourselves to the things that we’ve seen already work’.”

Our climate is changing, and our approaches to politics and activism have to change with it. That’s why The Nation, in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, has launched “Taking Heat,” a series of dispatches from the front lines of the climate-justice movement, by journalist Audrea Lim.

In “Taking Heat,” Lim explores the ways in which the communities that stand to lose the most from climate change are also becoming leaders in the climate resistance. From the farms of Puerto Rico to the tar sands of Canada, from the streets of Los Angeles to Kentucky’s coal country, communities are coming together to fight for a just transition to a greener and more equitable economy. At a time when extreme-weather events and the climate-policy impasse are increasingly dominating environmental news, “Taking Heat” focuses on the intersection of climate change with other social and political issues, showcasing the ingenious and inventive ways in which people are already reworking our economy and society. Follow along here.

* * *

dan Palermo’s street, in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood, was always his playground. As a child, the tranquil stretch of row houses, between the six-lane 4th Avenue thruway and the eternal shadow of the elevated Gowanus Expressway, was a place for him and his friends to hit baseballs with plastic bats.

Since 2017, the 26-year-old has also been its “block captain,” a role that emerged after Superstorm Sandy brought New York City to a week-long standstill, and the task of identifying neighborhood point-people ahead of emergencies began to seem more urgent. “We’re already close to the water,” he said. And the climate crisis promises to bring more extreme weather disasters to his street, located half a mile from New York Bay, whose waters inundated the nearby neighborhood of Red Hook after Sandy. “Our folks are already at a disadvantage. Sunset Park is a low-income community.”

The “block captain” initiative is part of the Sunset Park Climate Justice Center, which the community organization UPROSE established by popular demand at a series of neighborhood meetings following Sandy. The neighborhood, with its mix of Puerto Rican, Dominican, Ecuadorian, Mexican, and Chinese residents, is one of New York City’s six Significant Maritime and Industrial Areas—areas where polluting industries have historically been clustered, and where the city intends to continue clustering them. All are located in storm-surge areas. Also, all are predominantly low-income communities of color.

But since 1966, UPROSE has been organizing the neighborhood “block-by-block,” as their organizers say, to win lead-paint abatement legislation, fight an expansion of the Gowanus Expressway (high rates of asthma cluster in its immediate vicinity), defeat plans for a 520 mega-watt power plant, and initiate a community-led planning effort that transformed a former illegal dumping ground into a waterfront city park. And now, the Climate Justice Center intends to build climate adaptation and resiliency through a similar grassroots strategy.

These plans are in stark contrast to the more technocratic approach behind more well-publicized climate resiliency efforts in the city, like the $335 million Big U mega-engineering project—the result of a major design and architecture competition—to construct a protective barrier around lower Manhattan. (The first section, the East Side Coastal Resiliency project, is now undergoing public review, and construction is slated to begin in 2020.) Climate-mitigation efforts across the rest of the city include Mayor Bill de Blasio’s $10 billion plan to extend Lower Manhattan’s coast by up to two city blocks, and the inelegant rows of supersized sandbags along stretches of Red Hook in Brooklyn and Astoria in Queens. In partnership with the US Army Corps of Engineers, the city is building more than $1 billion worth of berms, flood walls, dunes, and other flood resiliency projects in Staten Island and Queens, and reforms to zoning and building codes will require new buildings to meet climate-resiliency guidelines.

Yet for UPROSE, “block-to-block” organizing, aimed at meaningfully engaging the community on climate adaptation, is necessary in a place like New York City—and a neighborhood like Sunset Park—where every block is different from the next: public-housing projects on one, auto salvaging shops on another, and restaurants or residential property on the next. And with some estimates projecting up to six feet of sea-level rise for parts of New York City by early in the next century, the industrial, waterfront areas of the neighborhood will be completely inundated.

“This idea that you could create a resiliency plan, and helicopter into a community and apply it, doesn’t work,” said UPROSE Executive Director Elizabeth Yeampierre. She mentioned the 90-plus auto shops near the Sunset Park waterfront, which she says have been targeted for shutdown by some environmentalists. Auto salvage shops, which disassemble old cars, can pose environmental and public health risks from chemicals and heavy metals leaching into the ground or becoming airborne as toxic dust—concerns that, with many auto salvage shops located in storm-surge zones, are growing more pressing as the climate crisis intensifies.

This could potentially harm local residents like Palermo and his family. But Palermo, an UPROSE organizer, does not advocate shutting them down. “They’re the biggest industry in our community,” he says. His work involves approaching and speaking, one-by-one, to the auto shop workers, and from this experience, he understands why climate interventions don’t rank high in their list of priorities. “Even if you want to save the world from pollution, these are still real jobs that people need to feed their families.”

So he talks to them about the risks to their own health. He listens to their concerns. (The most prevalent and pressing concern, he says, is about the skyrocketing rents and their risk of being displaced.) He seeks possible solutions to their problems, like alternatives to the toxic chemicals they can use, or how best to contain spills and leaks. And it is starting to work: Shop owners have asked him for more resources and to run shop-wide trainings to educate all their workers.

It is also precisely what the block captains are doing on their streets: speaking to neighbors (and landlords) about painting rooftops white (this can reduce heat buildup in the city), building a stormwater collection system (to reduce water usage and create a backup in case the water supply is ever cut off), and testing backyard soil for suitability for starting small urban farms. The work lacks the grandiosity of the Big U, but its result is an approach to climate adaptation that encourages participation by residents and draws on their knowledge and strengths: construction, growing food, reusing and repurposing—skills that are abundant among the residents of Sunset Park, according to Yeampierre.

Over time, these community-wide discussions have also prompted bigger projects that benefit the entire neighborhood, and help the city shift toward renewable energy. In November 2018, UPROSE launched New York City’s first community-owned solar cooperative—Sunset Park Solar, installed on the roof of the Brooklyn Army Terminal—which will be collectively owned by all energy users who subscribe, decrease their electricity costs, and be available to low-income renters, small businesses and homeowners alike.

Of course, climate-adaptation efforts—which include both local efforts like UPROSE’s and massive projects like the Big U—can’t tackle the actual causes of climate change. But at the very least, can such a hyperlocal, grassroots approach measure up to the scale and severity of future extreme-weather events?

“The question is not whether it’s scalable, it’s whether it’s replicable,” said Yeampierre. Each community needs to organize itself, with neighbors getting to know one another and identifying their own risks, she explains. “You can’t compare Alaska to New York or Michigan, or anyplace else. You need to look at the place and what their needs are.”

Yet the fact remains that, at every UPROSE community climate-planning meeting, residents ask to discuss displacement instead, raising questions of whether the “block-by-block” climate adaptation approach can be effective when residents are constantly facing more immediate threats. Industry City, a major commercial development that arrived on the Sunset Park waterfront after Sandy, is pushing for the area to be rezoned, which will likely drive up rents and operating costs for residents and small businesses. On the issue of scale, it’s worth mentioning that gentrification and skyrocketing rents are a citywide problem.

The NYC climate resiliency plan does encourage community organizations to adopt climate adaptation measures and lead emergency planning efforts. But for Yeampierre, city planning projects are often led by outside actors and corporations—“They’re coming in to support a vision be created by somebody else.” And that is how the issues of climate resiliency planning and gentrification overlap.

The climate crisis “demands that we start really thinking differently about economics and how we live,” she said, envisioning a future where Sunset Park’s economy is reoriented toward climate adaptation. The neighborhood’s industrial sector could be revitalized by attracting businesses that retrofit old buildings, manufacture or assemble solar panel and wind turbine parts, and install and maintain renewable-energy installations, she suggests. Jobs could go to local people, like the workers currently in auto shops. And in place of Industry City, the waterfront could become something like a market or distribution site for products from upstate farmers.

Whatever the vision, UPROSE is seeking a radical revision in how society approaches urban development—including developments prompted by the climate crisis. The city needs to see “the community as a partner in decision-making and planning on a very hyperlocal level, because they’re never going to have the resources to address all the impacts that are heading our way, whether it’s extreme heat, or whether it’s wind, or whether it’s water,” said Yeampierre. “Every single time there has been a disaster in New York City, people have stepped up, whether it was the blackout, whether it was Superstorm Sandy, whether it was September 11th. People have been unbelievably heroic. They fed each other. They’ve taken care of each other. I think that’s a source of strength that cities just don’t see.”

And for Palermo, the “For Sale” signs on his block, and the new cafes selling overpriced coffee, raise the question of what it means to create climate resilience on his street without his neighbors, or in the community without the people in the auto shops. “They’re a necessary part of the community,” he said. “Without the residents, who do we have to take care of?”

Our climate is changing, and our approaches to politics and activism have to change with it. That’s why The Nation, in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, has launched “Taking Heat,” a series of dispatches from the front lines of the climate-justice movement, by journalist Audrea Lim.

In “Taking Heat,” Lim explores the ways in which the communities that stand to lose the most from climate change are also becoming leaders in the climate resistance. From the farms of Puerto Rico to the tar sands of Canada, from the streets of Los Angeles to Kentucky’s coal country, communities are coming together to fight for a just transition to a greener and more equitable economy. At a time when extreme-weather events and climate-policy impasse are increasingly dominating environmental news, “Taking Heat” focuses on the intersection of climate change with other social and political issues, showcasing the ingenious and inventive ways in which people are already reworking our economy and society. There will be new dispatches every few weeks (follow along here).

* * *

amón Barba Torres had been working in the fields of Delano, California, for more than a decade when he decided to head north. The summer heat, which he recalls approaching 100 degrees nearly every day, was forcing employers to stop field work after about five hours, and he simply wasn’t making enough money. Torres had migrated from Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2003, at age 16, to help support his mother after his father died, and now he had a family of his own to support. He’d heard rumors that field work paid better, and the weather was more hospitable, in Washington State. So in 2012, he migrated for the season to pick strawberries and blueberries on the Sakuma Brothers farm near Bellingham.

Summer temperatures there rarely rose above 80 degrees, far more tolerable than in the California fields. Some other differences, though, were less welcome. For instance, Washington labor laws allowed children as young as 12 to work in the fields for less than the minimum wage, while in California farmworkers were required to be at least 14 years old. But because he was returning to California after the season, he kept quiet and did his work.

When Torres returned to Washington the following year, however, he got involved. A fellow worker who had just been fired for requesting a 2-cent raise asked him to intervene. “I was just too nice,” Torres said with a laugh, explaining why the worker had singled him out. He noted that most workers spoke only Mixtec or Triqui, indigenous languages from Oaxaca and Guerrero, while he, a Spanish-speaker, could better communicate with their employers. Soon, Torres had helped organize the support of 240 families in the Sakuma Brothers camp. A worker strike got the man rehired, but it got Torres fired. The consumer boycott of Sakuma Brothers that workers launched in response broadened in 2014 to include Driscoll’s, the California-based transnational berry company that the Sakuma Brothers were supplying, and then became an international affair in 2015 when they joined forces with tens of thousands of workers at farms in Mexico who were also supplying Driscoll’s. The sustained pressure seemed to work: In 2016, when Sakuma Brothers workers voted to unionize, the Familias Unidas por la Justicia farmworkers union, which now represents some 700 workers across several nearby farms, was formally recognized.

Today, Torres leads the union. It is both a time of hope for farmworkers, and also one of growing concern, as climate change is adding to the challenges the workers, and their representatives, must deal with. Torres sees farmworkers continuing to arrive from California, drawn not only by the union’s capacity to secure better working conditions and pay but also by the cooler climate. (The latest National Agricultural Workers Survey, based on data from 2015–16, found that only 19 percent of US farmworkers were migrants and only 30 percent of these migrant workers followed the crops—a steady decline over the last two decades. But state-level data only exist for California, and the survey doesn’t indicate where workers are migrating to and from.)

What’s certain is that temperatures are rising. The hottest year in recorded history was 2016, followed by 2017, 2015, and 2018, and California’s summers have increasingly been punctuated by record-breaking heat waves. A 2018 California government report projected even more severe heat waves, droughts, and wildfires for the future, with major public-health consequences for residents and workers, who will be exposed to more intense smoke, heat, and disease. (“All Californians will likely endure more illness and be at greater risk of early death because of climate change,” the report says.)

Washington State will hardly be spared (a 2018 federal climate-change assessment warned of growing wildfires, droughts, and disease in the Northwest), but temperatures there have increased more slowly over the last three decades than in any other US state.

Climate-driven migrations are almost certainly already happening, though there is debate among researchers about how realistic it is to reduce the decision to migrate to a single cause. The number of farmers fleeing north from Central America’s “Dry Corridor,” for instance, a region that stretches from Mexico to Panama and is home to 10.5 million people, has been rising for several years, spurred by longer and more frequent droughts that are linked to climate change. And the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center estimates that about 1.7 million people migrated within the United States in 2017 as a result of disasters (up from 1.1 million in 2016, and 63,000 in 2015).

Globally, an average of 21.5 million people were displaced each year between 2008 and 2015 from weather-related hazards, and within decades these migrations “could vastly exceed anything that has occurred before,” according to the UNHCR and World Bank. Experts have predicted that the South will lose 8 percent of its share of the US population by 2065, while the economies of the Northwest and West will grow.

In August 2017, Torres and his union experienced the all-too-real consequences of this new reality. With smoke from Canadian wildfires descending on Bellingham, which is less than 20 miles from the US-Canada border, Torres began receiving emergency text alerts urging people to remain indoors because of the poor air quality. He asked for the days off and was told “no.”

At the nearby Sarbanand blueberry farm, 28-year-old Honesto Silva Ibarra, a worker from Mexico, collapsed. He had complained for three days about feeling sick and needing to see a doctor. He fell into a coma and later died, prompting protests and strikes. “They didn’t care about us,” said Torres.

The union blames Ibarra’s death on the heat, smoke, and poor working conditions, but Sarbanand Farms and a relative claim that it resulted from untreated diabetes. A state Department of Labor and Industries investigation concluded that the company wasn’t responsible for his death, but the agency fined it $150,000 for separate labor violations unearthed in the process.

Torres, who was at a different farm picking blueberries when Ibarra collapsed, is cognizant of how immigration status separates him from Ibarra, who was working on an H2A visa, a program that allows companies to bring in foreign nationals for short-term agricultural work. The H2A program has been called a “modern-day system of indentured servitude” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, as it prevents workers from changing jobs and allows bosses to fire, deport, and even blacklist them if they complain. The program, says Torres, is “taking all the jobs away from us,” as farms choose not to rehire many of the California migrants they had employed in the previous season. In Washington State, the H2A program expanded from 3,000 workers in 2006 to almost 14,000 workers in 2016.

But Torres also understands that they all are “workers in the fields”—and his union includes many H2A workers. Together, these different classes of farmworker are caught between two migration realities: one driven primarily by the desire for a better life in an era defined by climate change, and the other by the need to protect corporate control and profitability.

The creation of Familias Unidas por la Justicia was an important step for the region’s farmworkers. It demonstrated that “immigrants can organize and win,” said Edgar Franks of Community to Community, a Bellingham-based immigrant-rights and food-sovereignty organization that helped establish the union. But in light of these new realities, Torres and others soon sensed that simply pushing for better pay and working conditions was no longer going to be enough.

They wanted more control—over things like the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which they worried were harming the health of consumers, including their families, and the workers being exposed to them daily—but also over whether it was too hot or smoky to work on a given day. They wanted the option to “choose if they want to be working under a union contract, or if they want to be owners,” Torres said.

So last year, Torres and three other union farmworkers launched the Cooperativa Tierra y Libertad, an organic farm cooperative whose name—“Land and Liberty”—references a slogan popularized by the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata during the 1910 Mexican Revolution. With the fundraising and legal support from Community to Community, they are now leasing 65 acres of land in Everson, Washington, and growing raspberries and blueberries, with plans to grow corn for tortillas they hope to make on site.

The worker-owners decide everything from how to produce and distribute their crops, to what tasks need to be completed each day. Workers take breaks and eat lunch when they want, knowing that the work will still need to be completed. And when another heat wave or smoke advisory arrives, they will be able to decide collectively, during their daily morning meeting, whether to halt work for the day. (In August 2018, smoke from Canadian wildfires was twice as dangerous in Bellingham than the previous year, when Ibarra died.)

Once the 12 workers currently employed by the co-op log a benchmark number of hours, they will join Torres and the other founders as worker-owners. The goal is to eventually buy the land, an option the current owners are open to and that Torres hopes can be achieved with the help of government funding. (The federal farm bill includes a program that provides grants to “socially disadvantaged farmers,” for instance.) And if, in 10 years, they do own the land, and the same workers are still with the co-op, Torres’s plan is for each to receive a house and a small plot rent-free, where “you can grow whatever you want,” he said.

A 2010 report by the US Agency for International Development on climate migration said that land tenure “will be instrumental in managing the increased population in migrant-receiving communities.… The poor, indigenous peoples, women, and other people with limited property rights are the most vulnerable to climate change impacts. Their limited capacity to invest in adaptation measures makes them less resilient.”

If Ramón Torres and his colleagues can pull it off, the cooperative’s vision would be an example of one way to mitigate the dire future described in the report. But their effort is important on a much more immediate level, too. Torres says that his cousin, Pedro Torres, one of Tierra y Libertad’s founders and the father of five children, sees the cooperative as “an opportunity to be a farmer and have something to give his kids.”

It won’t be easy. The reality of visas and corporate control, to say nothing of the growing problem of climate change, is hardly in retreat. And while life in the cooperative involves long days packed with meetings, managing inventory, working in the field, and then cleaning and locking up, Ramón Torres has no doubt that it is a far better life than the one he had picking strawberries for the Sakuma Brothers. A life that required him to show up at 4:30 am, work at least 8 to 10 hours on his knees in the mud and rain, and wait for supervisors to announce a break, before realizing at day’s end that they never did. “It was really hard,” he said. “And really boring.”

The cooperative, meanwhile, is filled with opportunity and potential. “There is that thing about how capitalism creates his own gravediggers, and we’re seeing it,” said Edgar Franks, referencing The Communist Manifesto. “Industry is so bad that it’s created people that will end the bad agricultural system and create a new one.”

Our climate is changing, and our approaches to politics and activism have to change with it. That’s why The Nation, in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, has launched “Taking Heat,” a series of dispatches from the front lines of the climate-justice movement, by journalist Audrea Lim.

In “Taking Heat,” Lim explores the ways in which the communities that stand to lose the most from climate change are also becoming leaders in the climate resistance. From the farms of Puerto Rico to the tar sands of Canada, from the streets of Los Angeles to Kentucky’s coal country, communities are coming together to fight for a just transition to a greener and more equitable economy. At a time when extreme-weather events and climate-policy impasse are increasingly dominating environmental news, “Taking Heat” focuses on the intersection of climate change with other social and political issues, showcasing the ingenious and inventive ways in which people are already reworking our economy and society. There will be new dispatches every few weeks (follow along here).

* * *

ose Cordier had been watching the lights go off for decades, and the darkness stir up chaos around her, when she decided something had to be done.

Cordier lives on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where 50 percent of people live below the poverty line, the Sicangu Lakota people are waging a fierce battle against the Keystone XL pipeline, and the Cherry-Todd Electric Cooperative services most residents of the reservation. Cordier’s neighbors’ power got cut whenever they were late paying the bill by just a few days. Immediately, they would begin running extension lines from other neighbors, including Cordier. According to Cordier, if they moved in with friends or family until their next paycheck arrived, the tribal housing authority might board up their homes. (The authority receives funds from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and federal regulations consider a home abandoned if left vacant and without power for 30 days).

Sometimes, this bought enough time for families to gather funds for the bill (not to mention the hefty late fees, disconnection fees, and reconnection fees that accumulated). But not always. One winter, when Cordier’s brother and his wife had their power cut, they moved in with her—and her brimming household of children and grandchildren—and wound up with their house boarded up for weeks.

Cordier knows that energy costs are a huge burden for rural, low-income families, sometimes coming to as much as one-fifth of household income. She also knew that no one on the Cherry-Todd coop board was advocating on their behalf: As a member-customer, she had been attending their annual meetings for over a decade, and she knew that ever since the coop was established in 1946, few tribal members had ever sat on the board, despite membership now being about 80 percent Native. So in 2013, when three of eight coop board seats opened up, she ran in the election with two other tribal members, Shawn Bordeaux and Ann-erika White Bird. That, Cordier says, is when they discovered that the deck was stacked against Native coop members.

Rural electric cooperatives are utility companies owned and operated by their member-customers—together, these cooperatives oversee the largest energy infrastructure in the nation. (Around 900 cooperatives provide power to 42 million member-owners and service a majority of the US landmass, including 93 percent of its “persistent poverty counties”). The earliest arose during the Great Depression, when 90 percent of rural homes lacked electricity, and private companies considered it unprofitable to extend power lines through the sparsely populated regions. Farmers responded by banding together, erecting their own power lines, and forming electric cooperatives. In what is now seen as a triumph of progressive rural organizing, their efforts became eligible for federal New Deal funding in 1936 through the Rural Electrification Act.

This structure of collective ownership and governance is what allows Cordier and other member-customers to run for the board, unlike in private companies or corporations. It also offers a potential framework for what climate activists call “energy democracy,” where people and communities control the source of their energy, its costs, and how to use, manage, regulate, and distribute it.

And as Cherry-Todd’s 2013 meeting began, the Rosebud tribe seemed poised to cash in on this promise. This was the biggest voter turnout in coop history, thanks to voter organizing by the grassroots group that Cordier co-runs, Oyate For Fairness and Equal Representation (or OFFER), and the Rosebud government’s offering support and ensuring transportation for tribal members to the meeting.

But as voting began, Cordier and others say they noticed that some of the white farmers and ranchers had received multiple ballots, one for each electrical meter (their household, their stock wells, their center pivots). (The coop disputes this fact). Cordier says she received only one, despite her separate accounts for her household and her second-hand shop. Either way, after the ballots for the election were counted, there were dozens more votes than there had just been for a floor vote on an amendment. All three tribal candidates lost.

“I just think the bottom line is there’s a lot of racism here,” said Cordier, reflecting on the outcome. “They saw us as a threat when all we wanted was fair treatment.”

Eighty-two years after the passage of the Rural Electrification Act, the experiences of Cordier and the Rosebud reservation’s electricity users are hardly unique, with coops exhibiting exceptionally low voter turnout, and majority-white boards often representing elite local interests in majority-black and majority-Native districts throughout the United States. Organizing efforts have had some success in the past, like the Coop Democracy and Development Project that empowered black coop members against their all-white boards in the rural South in the ’80s and ’90s. But this was ultimately limited by the inequities running through the rest of society.

Ronald Neiss, with whom Cordier runs OFFER, calls it “apartheid, ruled by a board.” And in South Dakota, this is a legacy of federal policy in the American West. The Rosebud reservation emerged from the 1889 partition of the Great Sioux Reservation, which in turn was created after the Lakota people had been forced off much of their lands. Federal authorities also encouraged them to embrace farming and the system of private land ownership that Congress had just cemented for white settlers in South Dakota (and throughout the West) through the 1862 Homestead Act. But by the start of the Great Depression, only 3 percent of South Dakota’s farms were recorded in the census as “American Indian.” The descendants of white settlers formed the cooperatives that brought electrical power to the region. And in the postwar era, when the federal government dammed the Missouri River, producing a plentiful supply of hydropower they sold to rural electric coops and other entities, they also flooded and destroyed massive sections of the Sioux reservations, including Rosebud and Standing Rock.

Today, the Basin Electric Power Cooperative, which generates electricity and distributes it to its own members, including Cherry-Todd and other electrical utilities, produces most of its power from coal, natural gas, and wind. Also, the mostly white Cherry County, Nebraska, has a per capita income of $27,891, while Todd County, South Dakota, located entirely within the Rosebud reservation, has a per capita income of just $11,821, and their uneven history lives on in the Cherry-Todd coop structure—and the way that local energy decisions are made. After the 2013 election, Cordier, Bordeaux and White Bird sued the co-op for voter fraud and discrimination, with the Rosebud Sioux Tribe soon joining the lawsuit too. The utility, they argued, is operating on tribal lands and is therefore within tribal jurisdiction—jurisdiction outlined in the 1868 Treaty.

Four years later, Cherry-Todd and the Rosebud Sioux Tribe are still in the process of settling the suit, and because of this, the coop’s general manager, Tim Grablander, declined to speak to The Nation. But thanks to OFFER, which has encouraged tribal coop members to run, organized voter turnout and empowerment drives, helped candidates to campaign, and secured funding and support from the tribal government, the board is now 50 percent Native. Today, the utility offers greater flexibility with late payments and, most notably, no longer shuts off the electricity right away. It has not yet agreed to reduce the hefty fees associated with late payment and power cutoffs, but another non-Native-held seat is also opening up this fall.

“It is an issue of sovereignty,” said Cordier, referring to a term that, in recent years, has mostly been used to describe the right of Native people to govern their own lands, including decisions about disbursing leases to pipeline corporations. But it might also describe the idea that a majority Native-owned coop, operating primarily on tribal lands, should be governed by Native people from the community. “They’ve been operating on our reservation all these years, and all these years they were un-curtailed.”

Now, this issue of who makes community decisions about the energy they use could also shape the transition to renewable energy, and by extension our responses to climate change. Individual consumers in 11 states, including New York, Texas, and Massachusetts, already have the option to switch to clean electricity providers, but renewables still account for only 11 percent of US energy consumption. In the past, the Cherry-Todd cooperative has opposed Obama’s Clean Power Plan to cut carbon pollution from power plants, and advocated for the North American Coal Corporation’s Freedom Mine—one of the biggest coal mines in the United States, which supplies energy to Basin Electric’s power plants. But this may now be changing.

“We’ve always had a problem with the pollution presented by coal-fired power plants or nuclear,” said Daniel Gargan Burnette, the Rosebud reservation’s Tribal Utilities Commissioner. “We know that we’re stewards of our own land.”

Recently, the tribe installed a rooftop community solar project on its Wicozani housing development, reducing electricity costs for residents by 20–25 percent, and they hope to install more on the reservation, said Burnette. These would “help with utility bills for tribal members,” not to mention bolster self-sufficiency for people on the reservation.

But the community solar and wind projects will only be financially viable if the tribe can apply “net-metering” rules, which allow the owners of solar panels or wind turbines to sell any excess electricity they generate back into the grid, and receive credit for it at a reasonable rate. And on the Rosebud reservation, that grid belongs to the Cherry-Todd Electric Cooperative. So far, the board has rejected the tribe’s net-metering code, but this could change, depending on the outcome of a separate legal challenge over whether the tribe has jurisdiction over these rules (The tribe is arguing, once again, that the coop is operating on tribal lands.) Or it might change with the shifting composition of Cherry-Todd’s board.

All of this hangs in the balance. Yet for Cordier, the goal was simply to alleviate disruptions to her neighbors, friends and family.

“I just wanted everyone to be treated fairly,” she said. “On our own reservation.”

Our climate is changing, and our approaches to politics and activism have to change with it. That’s why The Nation, in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, has launched “Taking Heat,” a series of dispatches from the front lines of the climate-justice movement, by journalist Audrea Lim.

In “Taking Heat,” Lim explores the ways in which the communities that stand to lose the most from climate change are also becoming leaders in the climate resistance. From the farms of Puerto Rico to the tar sands of Canada, from the streets of Los Angeles to Kentucky’s coal country, communities are coming together to fight for a just transition to a greener and more equitable economy. At a time when extreme-weather events and climate-policy impasse are increasingly dominating environmental news, “Taking Heat” focuses on the intersection of climate change with other social and political issues, showcasing the ingenious and inventive ways in which people are already reworking our economy and society. There will be new dispatches every few weeks (follow along here).

* * *

dan Anguiano had been working in the solar industry only a few months when his company, Evolution Energy, got a contract to install a solar-heating unit two blocks from his home, in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles. “I was working on the roof and looking straight at the view of where I grew up, and it was like, wow,” he recalled. Candles were flickering in the distance, and he recognized them as part of a sidewalk memorial for his friend Fred Barragan, who had been shot by police in March 2017, just weeks after Anguiano joined Evolution.

Just a few years earlier, Anguiano would never have imagined himself with this job, or any job. The 33-year-old had begun “making mistakes, getting into trouble” in high school, leading to a two-year stint in a juvenile-detention facility when he was 16, and then a couple of short prison terms in his twenties. “I didn’t have anything,” he said. He was no longer living with his ex and his kids, so he sought distraction by drinking and hanging out in the streets. “I fell back in the same old ways.”

Then a friend, David Andrade, suggested he check out the solar-installation program at Homeboy Industries, an organization that Father Greg Boyle and other community members started in Boyle Heights in 1988 to support and train people who had been incarcerated and involved with gangs. Anguiano had known Father Greg since he was 7; Boyle’s Dolores Mission parish was a short distance from the Aliso Village housing project where he grew up. Anguiano remembered Father Greg giving tennis shoes and money to people in the community. Now, he told Father Greg, he wanted to turn his life around. Father Greg handed him a slip of paper that read, “March 6, 2015.” It was his start date at Homeboy Industries.

Since 2010, Homeboy Industries has been offering tuition, tutoring, and financial support for “homies” to learn about solar-panel design, construction, and installation through the Photovoltaic Training program at the East Los Angeles Skills Center. Anguiano discovered through the four-month course that he loved the work, and was good at it, despite never completing high school. “It was a lot of math,” he said. “And math really spoke to me.”

But it was the hands-on rooftop experience he gained through GRID Alternatives, Homeboy’s partner in the program, that made him realize this was part of “something big.” GRID, a nonprofit organization, provides solar panels for free to low-income families in communities designated “red zone” by the California Environmental Protection Agency. These are poor neighborhoods that are plagued by environmental, air- and water-quality problems. According to GRID, the solar panels typically cut energy costs for homeowners by at least 50 percent, and often by as much as 80 or 90 percent. They also help to ensure that these communities are not left behind in the renewable-energy transition; installing rooftop solar panels can cost several thousand dollars.

But the panels are not really free. They are funded through state legislation that sets aside 35 percent of the proceeds from California’s cap-and-trade fund for green investment in red-zone communities. Since 2014, $1 billion has been delivered through this program. As the first statewide program in the country to redistribute money from the worst polluters to the most underrepresented and environmentally damaged communities, it also is something of a blueprint for the rest of the nation.

Red-zone communities include inner-city Los Angeles neighborhoods marred by active oil pumpjacks, as well as the predominantly Latino Boyle Heights, which is bisected by six freeways and exhibits a rate of childhood hospitalization higher than the statewide average, due to asthma. Through GRID, Anguiano clocked more than a hundred hours of volunteer experience installing panels for low-income families and homeowners in neighborhoods like his. “I felt good that we were helping them out,” he said.

It helped him out, too. In March 2017, he got his first job as a solar installer, making $15 an hour. After a little more than a year, he was promoted to crew leader and his hourly wage rose to $23. This is more money than he has ever made, and he still sees room to grow in his new career.

Anguiano wasn’t sure he was qualified to manage a team of four, but he surprised himself. “I’m teaching my crew, and everyone’s happy, working,” he said. His cousin, newly released from federal prison, recently joined his crew, and Anguiano has been training him. He’s proud of the work he does. “Sometimes we drive through apartment complexes,” he says, “and I tell my cousin, ‘I did this one right here.’”

s a renewable-energy worker, Anguiano is in an industry that employs 3.4 million people globally. According to the 2017 National Solar Jobs Census, employment in the solar sector in the United States has grown 168 percent since 2010, to more than 250,000 jobs across all 50 states. (Nationwide, 806,000 people are employed in the renewable-energy sector overall, and only 51,000 in coal mining.)

Most solar jobs in America—78 percent—are on the demand side, including sales and solar installation, not in manufacturing. And employers can hardly keep up with the demand: 18 percent reported having trouble finding qualified and experienced candidates to fill open positions. “Working in the solar program is a career opportunity,” said David Andrade, the friend who urged Anguiano to check out Homeboy, “not just job training.”

Andrade also sought out Homeboy after spending nearly a decade in prison. He got counseling, support, had his gang tattoos removed, and graduated from the solar-installation program in 2014. Today, he is the volunteer-and-training coordinator at GRID Alternatives, where he speaks proudly of the first Homeboy cohort he ushered through the program: All 19 were undergoing reentry after time in prison, and all 19 found jobs after graduation in the solar industry.

Andrade attributes the program’s success to the fact that it leads to meaningful work, in an industry that is expanding. Entry-level positions pay a living wage, and there is ample room for career and income growth.

California is at the center of the US solar industry, with 40 percent of the country’s solar capacity and some 100,000 solar-industry jobs (over 16,000 in Los Angeles County alone). Homeboy is part of RePower LA, a coalition of environmentalist, faith-based, community, and labor groups that works to generate good renewable-energy jobs and shift the city’s energy infrastructure away from fossil fuels.

These jobs are a crucial component of California’s move from a carbon-based economy to one that is carbon neutral. And as the Trump administration rolls back what small gains had previously been made on federal climate policy, state-level policies to cut emissions and stimulate the renewable-energy industry will also be a crucial component of the nationwide energy transition. But so far, Hawaii is the only state to commit to 100 percent renewable energy, which it is mandated to reach by 2045 (California is currently considering a similar legislative mandate).

Whether California is doing enough to address the climate crisis, or even the ongoing pollution in red-zone communities, is a matter of debate: With Los Angeles being the most traffic-clogged city in the world, electricity production and automobiles are still responsible for the lion’s share of emissions in the state.

Amy Vanderwarker, of the California Environmental Justice Alliance (a RePower member), has doubts that the cap-and-trade program, which funds the solar panels GRID provides, can cut California’s carbon emissions to its 2030 target: 40 percent below 1990 levels. Regardless, it does nothing to dismantle the network of refineries, factories, interchanges, and industrial facilities that are polluting neighborhoods like Boyle Heights in the first place. (Cap-and-trade schemes impose penalties on companies when they exceed a limit on emissions, meaning that the market dictates whether it is cost-effective for companies to pollute. Stronger emissions regulations, by contrast, can make polluting illegal.)

This kind of large-scale public investment in red-zone communities could also have unintended effects. “The danger that this could exacerbate existing displacement and gentrification is huge,” said Vanderwarker. Green space, modern infrastructure and good air and water quality make neighborhoods more attractive to homebuyers and the real-estate industry.

This is an issue for Boyle Heights, where skyrocketing rents already are sparking clashes over gentrification, as well as throughout Los Angeles, which is in the middle of a homelessness and affordable-housing crisis. David Andrade’s neighborhood, City Terrace, which borders Boyle Heights, has not been spared, either. He is lucky to live in the same house where he lived before he was incarcerated, but the rent has nearly doubled in that time.

Without his work with Homeboy, he says, “I’d be in trouble.”

If only more employers were willing to judge workers on their performance rather than their criminal record or appearance, Andrade says. “The reentry population is an untapped pool of talent of individuals who are trying to change their life.”

But the changes to Boyle Heights don’t bother Adan Anguiano as much. He still remembers, maybe too vividly, when four separate gangs populated the different corners of the Aliso Village project, and he takes comfort in not having to look over his shoulder when he walks outside. Anguiano is on track to achieve his dream: owning a house and a little boat, and, above all, being self-sufficient. “I like doing things that don’t have to do with being tied into the grid,” he explained. “But getting power from the sun? That’s something, like wow.”

Our climate is changing, and our approaches to politics and activism have to change with it. That’s why The Nation, in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, is launching “Taking Heat,” a series of dispatches from the front lines of the climate-justice movement, by journalist Audrea Lim.

In “Taking Heat,” Lim will explore the ways in which the communities that stand to lose the most from climate change are also becoming leaders in the climate resistance. From the farms of Puerto Rico to the tar sands of Canada, from the streets of Los Angeles to Kentucky’s coal country, communities are coming together to fight for a just transition to a greener and more equitable economy. At a time when extreme-weather events and climate-policy impasse are increasingly dominating environmental news, “Taking Heat” will focus on the intersection of climate change with other social and political issues, showcasing the ingenious and inventive ways in which people are already reworking our economy and society. There will be new dispatches every few weeks (follow along here).

* * *

urricane Maria sent Magha Garcia back to the beginning. In 2010, a brigade of 18 farmers had helped her cut trees, open roads, build a cistern, and start to plant a nursery for her new farm, Pachamama Bosque Jardín, on 13 acres of land in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. Five years earlier, Garcia had been living in the city of Corozal when mass layoffs hit. She lost her job as a social researcher, and wondered what to do next.

Garcia was 45, an age at which capitalism “doesn’t consider you a person who’s producing anymore,” she says, unless you’re someone with knowledge capital, “a consultant or adviser.” That was not Garcia’s case, and so her future in the city looked grim. She had been raised on a farm, in a family of farmers. “Better start growing my own food,” she decided.

In September 2017, Hurricane Maria dumped more than 30 inches of rain on parts of Puerto Rico, destroyed about 80 percent of the islands’ crop value, and left some towns without power for more than six months. Most distressingly, an accurate death toll remains elusive; though the government’s official toll lists 64 people as having died from Maria, some studies have come up with counts of more than 4,600.

Garcia’s root vegetables—ginger, cassava, taro, yams—survived the deluge, but most of her fruit trees were ruined.

Soon thereafter, another brigade arrived at Garcia’s farm, helping to clear the felled trees and restore a measure of order. She lives alone on the land and doesn’t have a lot of money. Government help was slow to materialize on the islands—the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been accused of being absent in the days after the storm—and ultimately proved to be inadequate. Without the volunteer assistance, Garcia says, rebuilding “would’ve been really challenging.”

In the absence of robust government aid, farmer brigades have helped to repair and restore countless farms since the storm. Some are affiliated with the Organización Boricuá de Agricultura Ecológica de Puerto Rico, a network of small-scale farmers that counts Garcia as a member, and that has been promoting the practice of agroecology on the archipelago since 1989.

Agroecology is an approach to farming that promotes diversity (through crop rotation, polycultures, or livestock integration), uses natural systems (such as planting flowers to attract insects that keep pest levels under control), and relies on farmers’ knowledge of local conditions. The result can be higher yields at lower costs, along with the more efficient use of resources and space, self-regulating agricultural environments, and self-sufficiency for farmers, who not only can feed themselves (rather than simply grow commodity crops for export), but won’t have to depend on commercial seeds and chemical pesticides and fertilizers.

This holistic approach treats farming as a component of its surrounding ecology, unlike the industrial monoculture model that seeks to maximize profit and efficiency, often at the expense of the environment. The negative effects of industrial farming are well-documented: pollution from fertilizers and pesticides, depleted water sources, degraded soil. Furthermore, the global food system is responsible for around a third of the world’s man-made greenhouse-gas emissions, largely from agricultural production, the manufacture of fertilizers, and refrigeration. The changing climate is already forcing farmers to adapt, and has even pushed some off water-sapped, desertified lands. The growing frequency and intensity of extreme-weather events, like Hurricane Maria, have been linked to climate change.

Agroecology isn’t the only way of farming that utilizes a holistic approach. Yet in Puerto Rico, at least, there is a harder-to-quantify piece of the agroecology movement that has been crucial to its success: the aforementioned farmer brigades.

These brigades not only act as crisis-support and mutual-aid recovery teams; they are also facilitators of adaptation and climate-smart policies. As Garcia notes, the brigades didn’t merely arrive when she was building her farm—or rebuilding it after the storm. Whenever farmers in the Organización Boricuá network need help, she says, they invite others to come with proper tools, shoes, eating utensils, and a dish to share. She considers her farm something that she shares with other Organización Boricuá members, in the sense that everyone—farming in different microclimates throughout the islands—can offer or accept help as needed, and either share or receive crops in times of abundance or scarcity.

This sharing model has its roots in El Movimiento Campesino a Campesino, which began in Guatemala in the 1970s and has since swept through Mexico and Central America. Its values of solidarity and a communal approach to production, consumption, and ownership are a stark contrast with the individualized, private-property-oriented mind-set that predominates throughout much of the United States.

At the end of the workday, the farmer hosting the brigade usually gives a workshop. Garcia’s most recent workshop introduced the many varieties of taro root and discussed how she harvested them from wild areas to plant on her farm. This was important because many of the newer farmers are young, and some don’t know how to eat the root, much less farm it.

As the climate and ecological systems are transformed, this knowledge-sharing among small farmers will be indispensable. What crops are most resilient? What methods work best? Similar interactions between farmers and the people they feed are part of the ecosystem, too. And they are at the heart of agroecology.

ara Rodríguez Besosa didn’t understand this when she helped to start a multi-farmer community-supported agriculture group, or CSA, in San Juan in 2010. But she learned quickly.

Rodríguez Besosa had been working at the stand of her mother’s farm CSA at the local farmers’ market, where she met other growers, discovered new vegetables, and learned how to cook them at home. She realized that, were it not for her job, she might never have known about these ingredients, much less have access to them. Most people in Puerto Rico shop at the islands’ supermarkets, which are full of cheap packaged foods from global exporters and the US mainland. Rodríguez Besosa also noticed that the organic produce at the city’s farmers’ plazas (which are permanent establishments, unlike the pop-up farmers’ markets) came from California, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, but not Puerto Rico. To understand what had happened to agriculture on her island, she began to read.

Starting in 1898, US colonialism cleared a path for the corporate takeover of Puerto Rico’s agricultural land. But in the 1940s, Operation Bootstrap, a series of projects designed to modernize the territory’s economy, promoted a shift away from agriculture toward industrialization, and many farms closed. By 2012, 83 percent of the islands’ farms were smaller than 50 cuerdas (48 acres), but those farms amounted to just a quarter of Puerto Rico’s agricultural land—and that land continued to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The result is that Puerto Rico now imports about 95 percent of the food it consumes (before Maria, it was 85 percent). And because of the 1920 Jones Act, which requires all goods shipped to Puerto Rico to be transported on US vessels, the imported foods are costly.

By 2010, Rodríguez Besosa had learned enough to take action. She created El Departamento de la Comida in San Juan, an online distribution company and CSA connected to local organic farms. When she began posting photos of the produce online, people asked, “Where can I eat it?” Before long, La Comida had added a restaurant with a menu that changed according to the available produce, in an effort to reduce food waste.

But Rodríguez Besosa, now 34, decided not to reopen the restaurant after it was flooded during Maria. The farmers she worked with had nothing to sell, and, more important, their safety and livelihoods were at risk. Instead, she began raising money for small farmers and the long-term development of agroecology, utilizing the newly launched Puerto Rico Resilience Fund. And as volunteers streamed into Puerto Rico after the hurricane, the fund also started its own brigade, coordinating visits to one or two farms a week.

The brigade didn’t only visit farms. In April, its members drove to the Berwind Elementary School in San Juan, which now also houses students from the Berwind Middle School, which had been damaged by Maria. The teachers were struggling; one classroom held three separate classes at once. And despite the overcrowding and heat, some rooms didn’t have fans, says Carol Ramos, a graduate student at the University of Puerto Rico’s School of Planning.

Ramos is working on a pilot project to introduce bottom-up decision-making into the school—no small feat for a school system used to top-down decision-making. And that project involves agroecology: On the three acres of green space attached to the school—highly unusual for Puerto Rico—Rodríguez Besosa’s brigade helped to build a greenhouse that will be transported to the middle school once it has been repaired. Inside the greenhouse, pumpkins, beans, tomatoes, sunflowers, oregano, guanabanas, coconut trees, and melons are growing; students will care for the plants at home over the summer.

This is important for Ramos, because agroecology is about more than just food. It’s about “food sovereignty,” she says, “which means you can decide politically where, how, and when…you want to grow food in your country.”

Still, much of Puerto Rico’s agricultural land remains in the hands of large corporations, and political and policy change comes slowly, if at all. A debt crisis, exacerbated by austerity measures that President Obama signed into law, had been slamming the territory even before Maria.

But for Ramos, dismantling the “colonial context” involves learning to make political decisions, including at the community level: What food should we grow? Should we compost? What, if any, chemicals should be used, and where? In Ramos’s view, there was no better place to start than by teaching these ideas to students—thereby empowering the next generation of leaders.

With over 500 million family farms producing about 80 percent of the world’s food, this is another way of asking whether agroecology’s lessons in democracy—and the human relationships it engenders—can be scaled up. For people like Rodríguez Besosa, the need is urgent: “We’re being bought out, literally—and not only through corporations and bonds, but also our land,” she says. “Every day, I see another person that’s not Puerto Rican purchasing something around me, either in the city or country.”

Yet her own story gives Rodríguez Besosa hope that change is possible. She just bought her own farm this spring, after Maria jeopardized her plans for a time. “I’ve seen the importance of getting something that can be owned by a Puerto Rican,” she says.

Read Next: Anthony Bourdain Knew There Was Nothing More Political Than Food

The day before the People’s Climate March in Washington, DC, Preyton Lambert—skinny, dreadlocked and sporting black-frame glasses—was getting hustled on a boulevard near the National Mall. Another boy restrained his arms, before throwing him to the ground. His cheek pressed against the pavement. Two girls recorded the encounter on their phones as a crowd looked on.

The youth were part of a delegation from Philadelphia’s Soil Generation, a group of black, radical, urban farmers, and this was an act of street theater, organized by the national It Takes Roots coalition of grassroots environmental groups. Among them were indigenous, Appalachian, and immigrant activists, each performing the attacks and defense of their communities and environment. “This is what happens to young black men and women almost everywhere,” explained Lambert. Their scene represented the most potent symbol of contemporary American racism: a young black man being brutalized by a cop. “We’re not just here for climate justice.”

So what does police brutality have to do with issues like carbon emissions, rising global temperatures, water pollution and government-by-oil-corporations that have dominated mainstream climate discourse?

Standing before the Capitol Reflecting Pool at the 200,000-strong Climate March the following day, Katherine Egland, the chair of the Environmental and Climate Justice Committee for the NAACP National Board of Directors, argued that, because low-income minority communities suffer the most adverse impacts of environmental pollution and climate change, this is also where the transition away from fossil fuels should begin.

In the east of Egland’s home state of Mississippi lies Kemper County, Mississippi, which is 60 percent African American and was home to some of the highest numbers of lynchings in the state from 1877–1950. It is also where the Kemper Project, soon to be operational, is located, an experimental “clean coal” plant that was a keystone of President Obama’s climate plan for reducing carbon emissions. The only major coal plant currently being constructed in the country today, it would be the first large-scale plant to use the energy-intensive Carbon Capture and Storage technology (which gasifies the coal, captures the carbon emissions, and stores them in the ground).

Concerns about leaking pipes aside, Egland is angry that, with a $7.3 billion price tag, costs for the nation’s most expensive power plant are now being passed on to residents of one of the nation’s poorest states. “That’s a huge investment in past, unsafe technology, when we could’ve had renewable energy and money to spare,” she said. “I’m not sure why we continue this addiction to fossil fuels when we know that we should be looking at renewable sources of energy.”

Kemper County is hardly the only black community to be sited near a coal plant: At least 68 percent of African Americans live within 30 miles of a coal-fired plant, compared with only 56 percent of the white population. This kind of data has largely been eclipsed by the numbers trumpeted by the climate movement: limiting atmospheric carbon emissions to 350 parts per million, and capping global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

But the racial disparity among victims of environmental pollution are stark: African Americans are exposed to 38 percent more polluted air than whites, and are 75 percent more likely to live in chemical-factory “fence-line zones” than the US average (Latinos are 60 percent more likely). And as global temperatures rise, climate change will also impact poor communities of color more drastically: Heat-related deaths occur at a 150–200 percent higher rate among African Americans than among whites, likely because cities tend to run a few degrees hotter than their surroundings (the “heat island effect”), and most African Americans live in cities and suburbs. As extreme weather grows more frequent, vulnerable communities will become yet more vulnerable.

These communities remain deeply underrepresented in the climate movement. “When you have to decide between going down to do something about climate change or trying to feed your children, or worrying about police brutality—those kinds of things take immediate precedent over the longer-term issues of air pollution and soil erosion,” said Jazzlyn Lindsey, standing alongside her Black Lives Matter delegation at the march, the whole crew dancing and drumming on overturned buckets.

Yet, for Katherine Egland, climate change and environmental pollution are civil-rights issues, just like criminal justice or education. “What would Dr. King say if he were here today?” she asked. When she was a child, the civil-rights leader would stay at her church when he passed through Mississippi, but he couldn’t have known at the time that they would win the fight against segregated water fountains yet lose the fight for clean water in places like Flint. She recalls something she said at a presentation she made at the 2014 New York climate march: “I think he would be saying, ‘Fossil free at last, fossil free at last, we’re going to be fossil free at last.’”

ome say that the environmental-justice movement is centuries old: Native Americans have been resisting the theft of their lands since the white man arrived; the Chicano-led United Farm Workers have been fighting pesticide use in the fields since the sixties; and black sanitation workers—the keepers of the urban environment—have been protesting unfair working conditions since the Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968—where Dr. King was heading when he was assassinated.

Yet race has remained a consistent blind spot in the environmental movement. This has begun to change as public attention alights on Native communities along the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines. But without directly addressing how environmental injustice impacts poor communities of color disproportionately, racial and economic inequality is likely to deepen as climate change grows more disruptive.

Climate change’s impacts can most frequently be felt through water: too much after a storm, too little during a drought, and how we manage and distribute it in between—mni wiconi, in other words: “Water is life.” Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy have battered America’s shores, and droughts in rural Syria helped fuel the civil war (migration to the cities exacerbated religious and political tensions), much as a severe water shortage is now fueling the civil war in Yemen (the capital city, Sanaa, could run out of water as early as this year).

But subtler environmental changes are also wreaking havoc around the country. Near Bethel, Alaska, gradually warming temperatures and coastal pollution are threatening the subsistence lifestyle of Julien Jacobs’s Alaska Native Yup’ik community. “We’re seeing waves wash over villages, and we’re also seeing a break in our entire ecological system,” he said. What will become of their culture if the whale, beluga, salmon, caribou, and moose they harvest become extinct?

Elsewhere in the United States, coastal retreat poses an existential threat to communities with identities connected to the land. On the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, which loses a football field’s worth of land to the sea every hour, an entire indigenous community—Isle de Jean Charles—is relocating. Already, a matrix of pipelines and canals carved into the wetlands by the oil industry are exacerbating erosion, but Energy Transfer Partners is still planning to build the final leg of its Dakota Access pipeline, the Bayou Bridge, across 11 parishes, including the freed-slave community of St. James. This parish is surrounded by oil refineries and LNG terminals (the area is known as “Cancer Alley” for illnesses connected to the facilities), and according to Cherri Foytlin, state director of Bold Louisiana, they want to evacuate too.

But “the companies aren’t buying them out.” Still, their culture is under threat even if they remain: Some claim that the oil canals are cutting off oxygen to the crawfish in the Atchafalaya Basin. “Who loves crawfish more than Louisiana?” asked Foytlin. The basin is the only place in the state where crawfish are still caught in the wild. “Protecting them and that way of life is important to all the cultures of Louisiana.”

ome communities live off the land more directly than others, but all communities remain inextricably connected to the earth; even Soylent, sometimes dubbed “the end of food,” is made from plants. In California’s Central Valley—America’s produce basket—drought and rising temperatures are already pushing Mexican farmworkers to migrate north to Bellingham, Washington. Edgar Franks, an organizer with Community to Community, a Bellingham grassroots organization for food sovereignty and immigrant rights, recalls them talking about getting nosebleeds and passing out from the 115 degree heat. Cooler climates awaited them in Washington, but the large industrial farms remain, as do the threats of ICE raids on the workers keeping the agricultural industry afloat.

These corporate factory farms are big contributors to climate change, from the petroleum-based chemical fertilizers to the fuel and refrigeration required to transport the produce across long distances. That is why Franks sees their efforts to establish worker-owned, organic farming cooperatives in Washington’s Whatcom and Skagit counties as integral to the climate movement. “The hope is to start building relationships locally with our food vendors to localize our food system, so money that’s exchanged stays within the community,” said Franks. “So we’re not transporting berries halfway across the world.”

Tribes are shoring up their sovereignty in similar ways, said Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network. “We’re bringing it back down to local communities, to build the resilience and power of our native nations.” Reverting to traditional ways of agriculture might entail a return to seeds that preexisted the arrival of white settlers (not to mention genetic modification). These would have naturally evolved to thrive in local ecosystems, and would lead to greater biodiversity than our current food system allows. “Many of them are starting to reevaluate the direction that they’re going, and that’s decades or 50 years from now,” he said of the tribes. “Food sovereignty is very critical.”

Faith Spotted Eagle—the Yankton Sioux Tribe grandmother famed for resisting Keystone XL under Obama—calls the centuries of “manifest destiny” that robbed indigenous Americans of their land, their livelihoods, and often their lives a “holocaust.” The Indian Wars, which accompanied the largest land-grab in US history, were intended to secure farmland and natural resources for white settlers, and were carried out through the mass displacement, genocide, and confinement to reservations of Native people .

Many at the Standing Rock encampment saw their treatment by Energy Transfer Partners and local police (who deployed dogs, tanks, flash grenades, and sound cannons against the water protectors) as just its latest iteration. Now Spotted Eagle is reviving the Cowboy and Indian Alliance—the coalition of white landowners and grassroots indigenous activists who rode into Washington and helped bring down Keystone XL in 2015—in response to the newly resurrected Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines. But this is not the only component of the Sioux resistance against the fossil-fuel government.

Along the sidelines of the Climate March, Spotted Eagle spoke with pride of the wind farms that her South Dakota tribe, along with six other Sioux tribes, was launching through the Oceti Sakowin Power Authority (established in 2015, it includes the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe as one of its members). This came about after a series of failed attempts by outside developers to harness the muscular prairie winds for a share of the profits. “So we became our own developers,” she said.

The result was the first tribal public power authority in the United States, an independent, nonprofit entity to construct and operate renewable energy resources at a local scale, and for the benefit of the community. Owned and controlled by the tribes (Spotted Eagle is on the advisory council of elders), the agency is designed to distribute surplus revenues back to the tribes for use in local development. And it also provides affordable clean energy to tribal ratepayers, helping to weaken the stranglehold of the fossil-fuel industry, and shoring up their self-reliance and sovereignty.

ommunity-owned renewables are not only a rural or tribal phenomenon. They exist in cities throughout the United States (including Los Angeles; Seattle; and Chattanooga, Tennessee), with residential customers of public power utilities paying average electricity rates that are 14 percent lower than for investor-owned utilities. In the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park, home to a sizable Latino and Chinese immigrant population, the community group UPROSE is working on three solar projects that will be community-owned and -governed, and will lower electricity costs for local subscribers (low-income households will be prioritized). But these solar projects are only one part of their larger vision for neighborhood development.

“The focus has always been on the climate,” said Elizabeth Yeampierre, UPROSE’s executive director, of the environmental movement. “But we have to think about co-pollutants, we have to think about racial justice, we have to think about displacement, we have to think about all the things that are putting our communities in harm’s way.”

At the center of her concerns is Sunset Park’s waterfront, home to one of New York City’s six Significant Maritime and Industrial Areas (where heavy industry is clustered). “But we’re losing it because of speculating developers who are turning it into the next destination location for the privileged,” she said. As in other gentrifying neighborhoods, skyrocketing housing costs are already pushing many low-income residents out of Sunset Park. But reserving that waterfront space for green manufacturers (and possibly offshore wind turbines) would not only slow this process but also provide local green jobs. “The industrial sector is the vehicle for our salvation,” she said.

To this end, UPROSE is part of the New York Renews coalition that is drafting state legislation to levy fees against companies for greenhouse-gas emissions, with 40 percent of the revenue to be earmarked for green-energy investment in “disadvantaged communities”—a statewide policy that could encourage decentralized, community-owned renewable energy. (The week of the Climate March, Senators Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley also introduced a similar federal bill, the “100 by 50” Act, but with a Republican-controlled Congress and an administration staffed by climate-science deniers and fossil-fuel executives, this was largely symbolic).

Five years ago, California paved the way with a similar piece of legislation, Senate Bill 535, and Vien Truong, director of the Van Jones–founded organization Green for All, helped push it through. Truong was born in a Hong Kong refugee camp to parents fleeing Vietnam, but grew up in the Oakland neighborhood known at the time as the “Murder Dubs” because it had the country’s highest homicide rates. It was the kind of place where “you don’t think about climate justice. You think about murder, drugs, education,” she said. Life expectancy in parts of Oakland were comparable to North Korea’s—but this turned out not to be only because of the murders. There was also groundwater contamination, an abundance of freeways bordering the Murder Dubs, and a lack of fresh food.

So when California began considering cap-and-trade—a scheme requiring companies to pay a penalty when they exceed a limit on emissions—Truong saw an opportunity. “Cap-and-trade can either hurt or help us,” she said. “If you do it wrong, you actually force polluters to move their pollution to the poorest, polluted communities, and clean up the richer and more affluent areas.” Her coalition secured a requirement that 35 percent of the revenue be reinvested in California’s most polluted census tracts—communities with some of the highest asthma and infant mortality rates, rent burdens, and numbers of high-school dropouts. Once the funds began rolling in, the communities chose how their allotments would be spent: trees to break up the concrete jungle, affordable housing to combat gentrification, bus passes for seniors, and free solar panels. This in turn created local jobs in solar installation, energy efficiency, and public transportation.

Critics argue that cap-and-trade, like fining small-scale drug dealers to curb organized crime, fails to address the root of the climate crisis: the limitless economic growth and endless consumption that lie at the heart of capitalism. (These critics include Pope Francis). Others believe that, short of ending capitalism tomorrow, a just transition to renewables will require redistributing wealth from polluters to the most polluted communities (through policies like SB 535 and New York Renews). Either way, the grassroots campaigns agree that the fossil-fuel era must end.

“Trump’s here wasting money on walls when we need water and food,” said Preyton Lambert, still buzzing from his performance.

In fact, this broader view of climate justice, which also encompasses issues of inequality, oppression, and sovereignty, hints at a more profound truth: The climate crisis offers a unique opportunity to reshape our economic system, and to create real alternatives to the profit-driven, fossil fuel–dependent system of white, corporate capitalism.

“The way that they zone us, where they locate their coal factories, where they plunder lands in Africa—that’s how slavery started, stealing resources from black and brown communities,” said Jazzlyn Lindsey. The day was balmy, and her Black Lives Matter contingent seemed to be hosting an impromptu party near the head of the march. “Healing that is part of the long list of reparations that America and colonialism has to make up for.”

Washington, DC, was sweltering on the 100th day of the Trump presidency, but that didn’t stop 200,000-some people from crowding the streets of Capitol Hill for the Peoples Climate March this Saturday. Indigenous water protectors led the way, announcing the arrival of the march with hand drums, songs, and Leonardo DiCaprio at their side. Activists, nurses, veterans, students, and science wonks trailed behind for blocks. Adorned with colorful costumes and puppets, they swayed to the brass bands, bhangra, and spontaneous outbursts of “We Shall Overcome” puncturing the crowd.

The march was the big tent of the climate movement, populated by both anti-capitalist activists who had blocked pipelines with their bodies, and Hillary Clinton supporters offering legislative solutions for combatting climate change. Several blocks behind the lively Black Lives Matter activists, a band of uniformed Boy Scouts crowded around their chaperone. A Chinese monk marched by a man in a polar-bear suit, visibly overheated as if in solidarity with his real-life Arctic counterparts.

“I Am a Marshall Islander. Where Will I Go?” read the sign that Netty Ley was cradling as she sat in the grass, watching the contingent of religious groups—“Keepers of the Faith,” as their banner announced—stream by.

“I couldn’t believe how much of the beach has eroded, and how much closer our house is now to the water,” said her husband, James, of their house on the tiny Pacific island that is quickly becoming engulfed by sea-level rise.

“A lot of our allies are realizing that this isn’t just a Native problem,” said Faith Spotted Eagle of the threats that the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access Pipelines pose to the Missouri River. The Yankton Sioux Tribe grandmother—famed for resisting Keystone XL under Obama, and then for being the first Native person to receive an Electoral College vote for President—spoke with pride about the wind farms that her South Dakota tribe, along with six other Sioux tribes, was launching through their Oceti Sakowin Power Authority.

But for Faith Spotted Eagle, as for climate activists around the world, Trump has also set back the clock of progress. With Keystone XL now resurrected, Spotted Eagle was also reviving the unlikely Cowboy and Indian Alliance, whose white landowners and grassroots indigenous activists rode upon Washington in 2015. “We have 17 million water users along the Missouri River that also use this lifeline for their grandchildren,” she said.

Many at the march had their targets set on Trump, who, in his first 100 days, has proposed defunding the Environmental Protection Agency, staffed several agencies with climate deniers, threatened to pull the US out of the Paris climate accord, and rolled back air and water regulations to buoy the dying coal industry. Just days before the march, Trump also signed executive orders to expand offshore oil and gas drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, and to consider overturning the designation of more than 100,000 acres of natural sites as “national monuments.” Maybe for this reason, Mar-a-Lago was a recurring theme on the protest placards (“Mar-a-Oh-No!” accompanied by a cartoon of Florida drowning; “Baked Alaska, Not Just a Mar-a-Lago Dessert”).

“The Earth was the first of God’s creations, and in terms of environmental justice, we’re destroying our earth,” said Pat Harper, who had traveled from Chicago, and was marching with 40 others from the interfaith group Faith in Place. “We talk about being conservative—well, conserve our earth. Conserve our water and air, give us natural lands.”

But amid the protest against Trump, some—like Faith Spotted Eagle—were also armed with visions of a just, green future that don’t simply conserve the status quo. Their visions include community-owned solar initiatives to provide low-cost, renewable energy to low-income residents, and establishing green manufacturing in neighborhoods that might otherwise be subject to gentrification.

Traveling from Brooklyn, the members of UPROSE carried painted images of Chico Mendez, Berta Carceres, and Grace Lee Boggs—all environmental activists who had passed away—their faces bobbing above the marching crowd. UPROSE is based in the Latino and Chinese immigrant neighborhood of Sunset Park, which is also home to New York City’s largest Significant Maritime and Industrial Areas (where heavy industry is clustered).

“But we’re losing it because of speculating developers who are turning it into the next destination location for the privileged,” said UPROSE’s executive director, Elizabeth Yeampierre. With skyrocketing housing costs already pushing many low-income residents out of Sunset Park, reserving space in the neighborhood for green manufacturers would not only slow the process, but also provide local, green jobs. According to Yeampierre, “We’re trying to get the governor and City of New York to understand that the industrial sector is the vehicle for our salvation.”

One week after the election, when the world felt thick with despair, I spoke on the phone to LaDonna Allard. It was a jolt. Allard is the co-founder of the Sacred Stone Camp, on the border of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation in North Dakota, where water protectors have been gathered since April to block Energy Transfer’s Dakota Access pipeline. I was writing an article about how the Trump administration might bolster the pipeline and undercut the movement blossoming in her backyard. Was she worried?

“No,” she spat, like a sillier question had never been posed. This was a radical departure from the foreboding I had encountered in everyone else for a week. “We’ve been fighting the US government since they stepped onto our country,” she said. “We’ve never had a voice, but we’ve always been protecting our resources and standing up for our water. Nothing changes.”

This was a reminder that, while the election ushered in a new political order, much of what awaits us—the attacks on civil liberties, the repression of political dissent, and the rollback of legal and regulatory protections for ordinary people against corporations—is old for communities like Standing Rock. What can we learn from their struggle? Bombarded for months with tear gas, sound cannons, rubber bullets, and water hoses (often in freezing temperatures, no less), the camp at Standing Rock grew from around 10 in April to thousands by fall. They transformed what might have otherwise been a remote, invisible, rural struggle into national headline news.

The camp has been called the largest gathering of Native Americans in recent history, mobilizing many who had never before been part of a political movement, and drawing urban supporters nationwide—native and non-native—to their cause. In December, the Obama administration finally succumbed to the pressure, denying Energy Transfer the permit to drill under the Missouri River near the reservation. This had been the tribe’s main concern: The crossing threatened their water supply, and that of many others.

The political landscape is about to change: The Trump administration has promised to target native reservations for their oil and gas reserves, dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, and push through a range of new pipelines, including Keystone XL. This will undoubtedly make the work of indigenous and environmental activists more difficult. And at a time when climate scientists say that limiting global temperature increases to internationally agreed-upon levels will require keeping all remaining oil reserves in the ground, this is also a hard shove toward climate disaster. But whatever the fate of the pipeline or the movement, it would be a mistake not to count Standing Rock’s achievements as victories.

In the wake of the election, liberals and leftists have been debating whether racial divisions fractured the working class and handed victory over to a racist demagogue. But I’m more interested in another question: What is there to learn, for our next four years, from a struggle rooted in native leadership and native rights, which also fought to protect the environment on behalf of all Americans? What can be gleaned from a movement that won at virtually the same moment that progressives lost?

Building the Movement We Need

The debate about racial divisions in the election has exploded, cluster bomb–like, across the liberal Internet. The argument boils down to a simple question: How did Hillary Clinton lose the white working-class vote, and how can the Democrats win them back?

One side, best exemplified by Mark Lilla in The New York Times, argues that identity politics—“calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, LGBT and women voters at every stop”—cost the Democrats the election by alienating white working-class voters. Instead, Lilla calls for a “post-identity liberalism” that would focus on “emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of” Americans.

At Slate, Jamelle Bouie countered Lilla’s model for a reinvigorated Democratic party with one of his own: Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns. As Bouie argues, a liberalism that doesn’t “engage with the specific problems of black workers or undocumented immigrants” will always fail to speak to a majority of Americans. Jackson’s campaigns recognized the unique problems of African-Americans—and of women, white farmers, gays and lesbians, and more—but framed them in a way that made each group’s struggle an integral part of a larger one.

According to Bouie, this kind of approach is so vital because low wages and an eroding social safety net indeed affect all workers, but black workers (and other workers of color) also face additional discrimination in securing jobs, education, housing, and health care. These disadvantages are different in kind—not just magnitude—from what white workers experience. Hence, black workers need both “specific and universal solutions,” expressed through “a politics that addresses all material disadvantage, whether rooted in class or caste.”

What form has this kind of “material disadvantage” taken at Standing Rock? It’s hard to know where to begin. The reservation—remote and economically-depressed—is home to an epidemic of homelessness, suicide, unemployment, and hopelessness, with 43 percent of residents living below the poverty line. Some have claimed that North Dakota’s strict voter-ID laws discriminate against Native Americans. The reservation is also surrounded by conservative, white towns: Many tribe members perceive the state capitol, Bismarck, just an hour north from the encampment, as notoriously racist.

Nationwide, Native Americans experience rates of poverty comparable to that of blacks and Hispanics—26 percent—and are more likely to be killed by police than any other group, including African Americans. What are the roots of these “disadvantages”? When I met Allard on the reservation in September, she recalled seeing her grandparents cry in the late-1950s, after the Army Corps flooded hundreds of thousands of acres of local reservation lands to build several dams. Many of the tribe’s most valuable natural resources were inundated (timber, wildlife, and fertile cropland), and entire tribal communities were forced to relocate. For Allard, this was an uncanny echo of the genocide her ancestors faced, when native lands were expropriated in service of America’s westward expansion. Now she perceives another echo in the Dakota Access pipeline. Originally meant to traverse the Missouri River north of Bismarck, city residents complained that it would threaten their municipal water supply, and the pipeline was rerouted to nearer the Standing Rock reservation in September 2014. It is significant that Bismarck is 92.4 percent white.

Would the Standing Rock movement have ballooned as it did if its rhetoric had focused solely on climate change and water pollution, issues that stand to surely affect us all? At the entrance to the camp, a row of tribal flags flutter in the wind, representing the hundred-some indigenous nations whose members have passed through. A few people I met had driven cross-country alone, first-time participants in a protest movement, and had felt compelled to join by the strongest show of native power they had ever seen. This was a diverse bunch: teachers, waitresses, lawyers, farm hands, graduate students and construction workers. They hailed from California, Maine, Florida, northern Canada, New Zealand, and Ecuador. More arrived each day.

Despite the fact that Standing Rock drew its support from native and non-native alike, there is no denying that America is more racially divided than it has been in decades—and our progressive spaces are often little better. Any progressive movement looking to effectively fight through the Trump era must reckon with this reality. But this movement cannot settle for just winning back the White House for the Democrats—it needs to build a truly cross-racial working-class consciousness.

Today, large nonprofits control the commanding heights of much of the progressive landscape, and the most exciting popular movements of the last few years—Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, Occupy—have shied away from articulating a clear political program or building an organizational structure. Many other varieties of political advocacy, activism, and organization fill the spaces in between. But whatever form it takes, no coalition or movement can function without a base. And building a base today means defending marginalized communities against the forces of white supremacy and neoliberalism, while also shoring up their power so that they’re never compelled to capitulate to corporations or neoliberal solutions. This isn’t just a theoretical possibility: If the Trump administration begins targeting native reservations for their oil and gas, cash-strapped tribal governments could be tempted to sign on by the prospect of resource royalties. In this way, native power, and not just climate justice, are integral to a broad, progressive movement.

Writing in Jacobin, Shuja Haider suggests one way of making this vision a reality: a “strong cord of solidarity” to connect these disparate struggles (around marriage equality, housing, climate justice or mass incarceration) in a working-class coalition of the “powerless against the powerful.” His inspiration? The original Rainbow Coalition, which the Black Panthers initiated in the spring of 1969 with members who would soon gather at that year’s United Front Against Fascism Conference in Oakland, and which pushed for a socialist economic agenda. (This is distinct from the Rainbow Coalition that Jesse Jackson popularized in the 80s.) Its members included the Puerto Rican street gang turned activist group Young Lords, Students for a Democratic Society, the American Indian Movement, and the white, working-class Young Patriots, whose members were poor Appalachian migrants in Chicago’s Uptown slum. Each organized their own communities around the specific issues they faced. Each did so through an explicitly anti-racist framework—and an economic justice framework.

Any movement able to take on Trumpism, paradoxically, will need to include many of the white working-class people in America’s heartland who, in casting a vote for Trump, either supported a racist agenda or felt comfortable overlooking it. The Rainbow Coalition took on a similar task in its day, upholding a principle that originated with the Black Power movement to deal with white racism within the civil rights movement: to “organize your own people.” Essentially, white activists were asked to take their anti-racist message to poor, white communities, rather than focusing on organizing black communities.

This didn’t mean that organizers of different colors didn’t collaborate. It simply meant that each group, whether the Young Lords or the Young Patriots, focused on building a “strong base in its own community and a clear program for moving members to stand up for the rights of others,” as James Tracy and Amy Sonnie write in Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power. The Young Patriots organized their fellow working-class whites and even called themselves “Hillbilly Nationalists” at the same time as they fought against racism.

“We reached a period in the civil rights movement when black people felt they weren’t being given the respect they should have,” said Peggy Terry in Hillbilly Nationalists, of her shift in the sixties from organizing black communities to organizing her own. (Terry was a poor, white organizer with the SDS-affiliated group Jobs or Income Now, or JOIN, a precursor to the Young Patriots.) Hers was a world marred by racial division, and it was both pragmatic and useful for her to be organizing opposition in her own backyard. “There was never any rift in my mind or my heart.”

Much of the recent discourse on whiteness has focused on privilege and being a “good ally” within black, brown, and queer movements. There is undoubtedly value in this, and any cross-racial movement we build now must prioritize the voices of the communities most impacted by America’s racial capitalism. But there is also value—and urgency—in dismantling white supremacy among the white working class, who also stand to lose under the anti-labor, anti-environment and anti-democratic policies the Trump administration has promised. Some of this work is already happening—under the umbrella of the Showing Up for Racial Justice coalition, for instance—albeit far from the eyes of the mainstream media.

This is not a vision of segregated struggles. The movement at Standing Rock thrived under native leadership, but it also drew strength from being inclusive, intersectional, and diverse. Some of the original campers at Sacred Stone were non-native environmental activists who had participated in other pipeline blockades, including at Keystone XL, while organizers with environmental nonprofits, like 350.org, quietly provided strategic and logistical support. Non-native delegations, including from Black Lives Matter, also arrived from cities to show solidarity and help out in the camp. In an especially moving episode, more than 2,000 US Army Vets arrived to form a human shield around the water protectors. They ended their trip on bended knee, apologizing to Sioux spiritual leaders.

“We came. We fought you. We took your land. We signed treaties that we broke,” recited Wes Clark Jr., one of their organizers. “We are at your service, and we beg for your forgiveness.”

Meanwhile, in urban centers across America, solidarity actions helped to increase visibility for the tribe and target the financial institutions supporting the pipeline. Some urban activists joined caravans to Standing Rock, but many more organized events and actions in their cities, bridging the rural-urban divide that has often plagued the left.

Justice and victory aren’t mutually exclusive. The problem with much of the “race vs. class” debate is that it either fixates on “winning back” the roughly 25.5 percent of Americans who voted for Trump, or supposes that a single line of rhetoric can mobilize every subset of the working class. But ignoring racial disparities won’t make them disappear. That will only happen when they are eliminated through social and political change.

Whatever the limitations of grassroots struggles like Standing Rock—it is focused around a single task, for one—these are the movements that have been mobilizing masses, building a base and holding the line against white supremacy and neoliberalism. We should build on their work, and support others waging similar, invisible fights (like the White Earth Reservation’s battle against the Line 3 pipeline). We should also create space for those communities to thrive by organizing against white supremacy—and the neoliberal policies undergirding it—in the heartland of America.

“We’ll continue to stand up,” said Allard on the phone, somewhat resigned. This was a reminder that progress isn’t an entitlement, like a train we simply choose to board, but something to be fought for. “If we had to worry about what the US government was doing at all times, we’d drive ourselves nuts.”

China’s friendship with Africa was forged in revolutionary solidarity during the early years of the Cold War. This was the era of national liberation struggles, and China, seeing in Africa a reflection of its own humiliation by Imperial Japan and the West, offered military intelligence, weapons and training to revolutionaries across the continent.

This did not last—most African countries severed ties with China when it sided with apartheid South Africa in the Angolan Civil War—but since China’s capitalist transition began, 1 million Chinese have migrated to Africa, and accusations of China’s imperial designs on the continent have trailed closely behind them. Many of these allegations have originated in the West and extend beyond China’s actions in Africa, to include its holdings of US Treasury bills, its territorial disputes in neighboring waters, and its land and resource grabs worldwide. China is now on the defensive: “The Chinese people do not have the gene for invading others or dominating the world in their blood,” President Xi Jinping said earlier this year.

The accusations have also hit closer to home, targeting the Chinese government’s repressive policies in Tibet and Xinjiang, where Han immigration has increased in recent years. This large-scale outward migration has stoked fears about China’s rise, many of them irrational, if not racist. But it is also clear that China’s relationship with Africa and its own borderlands is no longer one of revolutionary solidarity. Rather, it is based on the demands of sovereignty and the need to maintain economic growth.

In China’s Second Continent, Howard French, who was a New York Times bureau chief in both Africa (from 1994 to 1998) and China (from 2003 to 2008), speaks with Chinese shop owners, farmers, industrialists and corporate executives throughout West and Central Africa. Many came to work on Chinese construction projects and stayed. Some are part of China’s “Lost Generation”: those now in their 40s to 60s who grew up in the age of the iron rice bowl and lacked the skills or education to succeed once China’s transition began. Many see Africa as more stable and free than China, as well as less crowded, polluted and corrupt. Nearly all are “rough-and-tumble types,” as French writes, “all grit and no polish, hayseeds driven to quit the poor Chinese countryside and determined to make it by whatever means necessary.” As one Chinese trader tells him about working in Senegal: “This is an open country, a friendly country, a country that respects the rule of law and believes in treating everyone equally.”

Above all, these migrants are a result of China’s “go out” policy, initiated in 1999, which directed state-owned enterprises to seek business opportunities abroad. The estimated 1 million Chinese working in Africa have helped China secure key natural resources for manufacturing, food supplies for its growing population, and new export markets for its goods. Today, petty traders have cornered the import market in Senegal; Chinese companies in Sierra Leone, Congo and Zambia are capitalizing on mining industries that have been privatized in recent decades or that collapsed after civil wars; investors are snapping up farmland in Mali; and in Namibia’s Oshikango Chinatown, restaurants, hotels and bars have sprung up to service the Chinese community. China’s trade with Africa is now growing by as much as 20 percent a year. In 2012, this amount was estimated at $200 billion. Today, it surpasses China’s trade with both Europe and the United States.

“You should never go anywhere where there are no Chinese,” a Chinese administrative worker in Mali jokes to French.

“Is that because such places are too dangerous?” he asks.

“Wrong,” says his interviewee. “It’s because those are places where it is impossible to make money.”

* * *

Not surprisingly, this attitude has bred some resentment toward the Chinese. Their offenses include damaging the environment, destroying local markets by dumping cheap goods, paying kickbacks to corrupt politicians, and vastly underpaying workers while flouting local labor standards. China’s export of its own workers to Africa doesn’t help either: not only are local workers being shut out of the new industries, but skills and knowledge aren’t being transferred either, setting up what will become a culture of dependency. Chinese banks have financed most new highways on the continent; contracts are usually granted to Chinese companies employing Chinese workers, and these vast infrastructure projects have been bartered in exchange for resource-extraction rights. In Guinea, the China International Fund—a $5 billion package deal proposing infrastructure projects in exchange for iron ore, bauxite and oil exploration rights—was offered to Guinea’s leaders within days of the mass rape of demonstrators protesting the country’s military rule.

“Practically every African leader, whatever his ideological orientation, has gotten a palace of some sort from the Chinese,” Guinean academic Amadou Dano Barry tells French. “The problem is, they never taught us how to maintain it. Even now, when the light bulbs are burned out, we have to call the Chinese to change them.”

The situation has become explosive at times. In 2006, when local workers at the Chinese state-owned Chambishi Copper Mine in Zambia demanded better safety, higher wages and back pay, they were met with gunfire. Nevertheless, Chinese companies and workers have been welcomed, if uneasily at times, throughout Africa: “rarely, if ever, had I met anyone who could be fairly described as plainly ‘anti-Chinese,’” writes French. Thanks to China’s “unbeatable triple-play”—cheaper financing from state banks, cheaper materials and cheaper labor—Chinese companies have not only rendered Western companies all but insignificant, but they have become paradigms of productivity. “Americans made beautiful, principled speeches and imposed countless conditions on all manner of things,” writes French. “But in the end, in Africa they seemed to move the ball very slowly. They regarded Africa not as a terrain of opportunity, or even as a morally compelling challenge to humanity, but as a burden, and largely as one to be evaded as much as possible.”

China is the only superpower that has invested in Africa as a place of promise and growth, and this is significant because Africa’s population is set to double over the next half-century, with its middle class rapidly expanding and many of its economies among the fastest-growing in the world. “People have welcomed the Chinese because they were an alternative,” Joseph Rahall, head of the indigenous NGO Green Scenery, tells French, “because there are times when you can find yourself with no investors, and the West just wags its finger at you and calls you corrupt.”

China’s own capitalist transformation has placed enormous pressures on society, where a growing middle class has increased demand for resources, consumer goods and export markets. Individual entrepreneurs and companies may have gone to Africa to get rich, but China’s overall expansion into the continent is an attempt to deal with pressures felt internally, much as America’s outward expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was meant to buttress its domestic progress and prosperity (as outlined in William Appleman Williams’s The Contours of American History).

The complicated fact is that despite China’s many trespasses, it is providing Africa with much-needed infrastructure and is integrating it into the networks of global capitalism on a scale that Western superpowers never have, including during the Age of Empire. China’s Second Continent doesn’t cover North Africa, but even here, where France has retained a foothold in the postcolonial era, China is beginning to encroach on Western interests, combining hard investments with a rhetoric of mutual gain (or “win-win,” as Chinese officials say).

In Bamako, French’s driver informs him that the Malians don’t like the Chinese, but as they drive by the hospital and the Friendship Bridge, he remarks wistfully: “They built it for us for free.”

“Here was China’s bid for soft power,” French reflects. The bridge “would soon be carrying perhaps a third of the people who crossed the river each day, taking them past the biggest and newest hospital in the country. And if people remembered one thing about it, for now, it would be that it was free.”

* * *

China’s policies in its borderlands are just as complicated, but debates about whether Tibet or Xinjiang is “free” are considerably less nuanced. Certainly, China’s heavy police and military presence creates a vastly different atmosphere: in Africa, Chinese security guards protect only Chinese properties, whereas the borders of Tibet are heavily patrolled, and Tibetan towns are kept under twenty-four-hour CCTV surveillance and periodically placed on total lockdown. To protest this situation, over 100 monks have immolated themselves since 2008, when riots against the Han Chinese spread throughout the Tibetan Autonomous Region, prompting the subsequent crackdown. “If Tibetans saw even a sliver of an opportunity to hold demonstrations, then they would not resort to self-immolation,” wrote Woeser, the dissident Tibetan writer, in The New York Times in March.

The situation is similar in China’s Muslim region of Xinjiang, which also bears a heavy military presence. Convoys continuously patrol the capital, Urumqi, and SWAT teams are stationed on side streets, lying in wait. The fear is of riots like those in 2009, or yet more attacks by Uighur separatists against the Han Chinese, who have migrated to the region in overwhelming numbers and now dominate economic life—including the region’s lucrative oil fields—largely to the exclusion of the Uighurs.

These are the places that The Sunday Telegraph’s Beijing correspondent, David Eimer, visits in The Emperor Far Away, his travelogue of China’s distant frontiers. These regions (Tibet, Xinjiang, Yunnan and Dongbei) account for roughly two-thirds of China’s land mass and include most of the 100 million people in China who are not Han Chinese, many of whom are among the fifty-five ethnic minorities officially recognized by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). These are places where, according to Eimer, “nationality is a nebulous concept” and “the passport a person possesses is less important than their ethnicity.”

Not all of these regions are as heavily policed by the state. Yunnan, which neighbors Burma, Laos and Vietnam, is the most ethnically diverse region of China, yet its borders are porous, unlike those of Tibet and Xinjiang. Drugs and migrants enter in large numbers from the Golden Triangle, where much of the world’s heroin originates, and where drug profits in Myanmar’s Wa and Shan states allow generals—buttressed by private armies numbering in the tens of thousands—to control what are effectively autonomous states. “With the CCP believing [the region’s] ethnic groups to be no challenge to their authority,” writes Eimer, “the combination of those multinational links and a lack of state supervision render the Yunnan borderlands the most lawless in all China.”

The relative absence of Chinese military or security forces is significant. Eimer finds Yunnan’s minorities neither outwardly critical of the regime nor utterly subdued by oppression, but rather “ideal junior comrades, happy to sing and dance in their colorful costumes for Chinese tourists while Han officials get on with running the show.” For Eimer, they are model minorities, similar to the stereotype of Chinese-Americans in the United States. Some groups, Eimer also discovers, are particularly savvy about reserving the most valuable aspects of their identity (language, culture and religion) for private life, with the most “Janus-like” and “Machiavellian” of these being the Dai, who are the Xishuangbanna region’s largest ethnic group and its historical rulers, and who, in times past, displaced what are now the hill tribes from the lowland jungles.

The colonialist undertones of Eimer’s interpretation (stereotyping Yunnan’s manifold ethnic groups and their many constituents as eager yet passive, and the echoes of “yellow peril” anxieties about calculating, two-faced Asians swindling the West) belie his larger misreading of the borderlands, which is to overemphasize cultural differences as the root of ethnic tensions, at the expense of economics. Eimer even hints at this fact between his contributions to what French describes as the “age-old expat’s game of armchair diagnostician of whatever ails Africa” (except in this case, China): “The Dai are less malleable than [Xishuangbanna’s] other minorities,” he writes, “because their ownership of valuable land gives them economic power.” But he does not seize on it.

With the local economy being driven by rubber farms owned by the Han, located on land bought or rented from the Dai, and gradually expanding upland into areas the hill tribes now inhabit, the Han farmers and Dai landowners are the only ones profiting. This has bred resentment toward the Dai among the other minorities of the region, much as China’s presence in Africa has bred resentment against the Chinese. “Their lives are generally far easier than those of [Xishuangbanna’s] hill tribes and the minorities elsewhere in Yunnan, as well as most rural residents of inland China,” Eimer writes.

* * *

Few things are more crucial and contested in contemporary China than land: who owns it, inhabits it, profits from it, benefits from it, and bears the ill effects of its development. Throughout the borderlands, local communities have been displaced by industry, whether it’s rubber farming in Yunnan, gold mining in Tibet, or oil and gas extraction in Xinjiang. Much of this displacement also stems from the construction of supporting infrastructure, which besides requiring the transportation of workers to site and resources to market has also led to sizable increases in Han tourism and migration. The Uighurs are now a minority in their own lands; in Urumqi, they currently make up only 10 percent of the population and have been largely confined to one neighborhood of the city. Han vacation homes have driven up real estate prices in Yunnan, while the zang piao, or “Tibet drifters”—young Han who reject the rampant commercialism and conformism of the coastal cities—now constitute something like a bohemian enclave in Lhasa’s old town, spurring an increase in commercial rents and displacing most Tibetans, not unlike the gentrification occurring in San Francisco or New York City.

With China attempting to bring all fallow land and untapped resources into productive use, Han domination in the borderlands is fundamentally linked to rapid industrialization. The resulting ethnic tensions may be expressed as cultural clashes, but in their current manifestation, they are rooted in economic disparities. Meanwhile, Han immigration to the borderlands is far from slowing: the Tibet-to-Qinghai rail, which opened in 2006 to great fanfare within China’s official circles, continues to bring more tourists and Han migrants to Tibet each year. Even within North Korea, Chinese companies have set up joint ventures to develop some of the world’s largest untapped reserves of coal and iron ore and are almost certainly funding the construction of new roads, even though very few North Koreans own cars.

Wang Hui, the leading figure in what is widely considered to be China’s “New Left,” has argued that the country’s economic transition should be seen as an attempt to maintain economic self-sufficiency and find its own solutions to the social crises and imbalances that have developed in this process. Viewed in this way, China’s actions along its borderlands and in Africa can be understood as part of the same strategy: the ultimate goal is to maintain the sovereignty and stability of the Chinese state. With industry and the middle class growing (not to mention thousands of “mass incidents” occurring nationwide each year), this also involves maintaining economic growth. Whether China is succeeding is another question: the inept bureaucracies installed by Beijing in Tibet and Xinjiang are plainly oppressive and meeting with resistance. But the “religion of commerce” that Eimer associates with the Han, and China’s growing presence along its frontiers and in Africa, should be understood as extensions of global capitalism, not of Chinese culture. In fact, China’s transformation has also left many Han Chinese impoverished and without social or legal protections against developers and corporations.

This is not to deny China’s increasingly violent repression of culture and religion in Tibet and Xinjiang, nor to excuse it. It is only to say that the recent polarization of ethnic relations in Tibet and Xinjiang is the result of China’s uneasy transition to a capitalist economy and the Han migration that followed. China’s repression of Tibetan and Uighur culture and religion far precede this transition, while its increasing ruthlessness in recent years is driven by efforts to secure the region’s natural resources for the greater good. This is no “clash of civilizations,” but rather a clash shaped primarily by the new economic forces in a nation-state, already teetering on the brink of instability, that seeks to maintain sovereignty within its own borders.

Over the last decade, Hong Kong academics Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong have written extensively arguing that the labor and environmental abuses of Chinese corporations in Africa are no worse than those of Western companies, and that a great deal of the West’s discourse on the subject perpetuates racist stereotypes about China’s neocolonialist expansion. This should not excuse China’s many offenses, as Yan and Sautman seem to do at times, but their insights do highlight a crucial fact: castigating China while letting the United States off the hook would be an act of moral relativism. If anything, China’s precipitous rise is a reflection of its ability to mobilize resources at a pace and on a scale that is leaving its competitors in the dust in the global game of neoliberalism.

If it wasn’t for the cannons, the pond might be a tranquil sight: its rippling surface reflects the blue of the sky, diffusing the harsh midday light. But the cannons fire sporadically, a warning to migrating ducks not to land in this toxic soup of arsenic, mercury and carcinogenic hydrocarbons—1,600 ducks died after landing in one of these tailings ponds in 2008.

This is the epicenter of the Athabasca Tar Sands operation in northeastern Alberta, Canada, just outside the oil boomtown of Fort McMurray. It’s the third-largest proven deposit of crude oil and the largest industrial project on earth—so costly and environmentally destructive that it’s considered a frontier resource, viable only because conventional oil sources are in decline. I visited in late June as part of the Tar Sands Healing Walk, in which First Nations activists led 250 participants on a fourteen-kilometer loop of the oil producer Syncrude’s operations there. The air was noxious and the scale of the destruction nearly impossible to take in, but the Dene drummers steadied us with their constant beat.

Tailings are a byproduct of tar sands processing, a wastewater residue left to collect in pools so vast and numerous that they can be seen from outer space. These tailings ponds are not secure: an Environment Canada study from February confirmed that the ponds are leaking into the Athabasca River, which flows into the Mackenzie—the largest river system in Canada—before discharging into the Arctic Ocean. Fort Chipewyan, a remote hamlet downstream from Fort McMurray, emerged in the national consciousness in 2006 when its only doctor, John O’Connor, went public about the high rate of rare cancers in the community. Health Canada accused him of misconduct when O’Connor suggested that this might be connected to tar sands pollution.

Shell has now proposed the Jackpine Mine Expansion and the Pierre River Mine on the traditional territory of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, which includes Fort Chipewyan. “You’d be kidding if you thought that Shell hasn’t been offering sweet deal after sweet deal to our nation,” said ACFN spokeswoman and Fort Chipewyan resident Eriel Deranger. “But instead of making money, we’ve spent close to $2 million already to challenge these projects.” The ACFN asserts that the projects will destroy its cultural livelihood along with the ecosystem itself.

“We have a line that shouldn’t be crossed, as per our elders’ council, and we’re holding it,” Deranger continued. “It’s not about money. It’s about the protection and preservation of our land, culture and identity.”

* * *

This is the front line in the fight against tar sands development. When most of Canada’s First Nations ceded their territories to the British crown in the late nineteenth century, they did so in exchange not only for reserves but also for the right to hunt and fish on their traditional lands in perpetuity—lands which many of these nations now say are threatened by rapid resource development.

The last few years have seen an onslaught of lawsuits against tar sands development based on these rights, with the ACFN currently challenging specific projects like the Jackpine expansion and the Pierre River Mine, as well as government policies like the Lower Athabasca Regional Plan. Some of the lawsuits seek compensation for the damage already done, but most are seeking the recognition of native rights on these traditional territories (not merely on their reserves), including a say over project approval and development.

In fact, native communities across Canada are on a legal winning streak against the resource sector. And these courtroom challenges are not only significant for indigenous communities: the conservative Stephen Harper administration’s ongoing dismantlement of federal environmental protections have left native treaty rights as one of the most powerful lines of defense for the food and water sources that everyone needs to survive.

This rollback of environmental safeguards set off Idle No More, an indigenous grassroots movement launched in 2012 as a protest against Harper’s Bill C-38, which imposed business-friendly provisions in dozens of pieces of legislation, ranging from changes in environmental regulations to the outright repeal of the Fair Wages and Hours of Labour Act. Crucially, it also violated indigenous treaty rights and threatened the environment in traditional First Nations lands. Within weeks, what began as a hunger strike by a single chief in Ontario had snowballed, Occupy-like, into a nationwide movement, thanks to a social media campaign that spread images, inspiration and news of the protests across Canada, reaching far beyond the metropolitan centers to remote rural communities, including the subarctic. Solidarity actions occurred throughout the United States, and even in London, Berlin, Stockholm and Cairo.

“Our nation stands by this: we need a moratorium on all new project development until we determine the impacts of these projects on treaty and aboriginal rights,” Deranger said. “We don’t know what the baselines are for First Nations to be able to continue duck hunting—what river flows, climate, ecosystem and thresholds are needed in order for that activity to continue. Same with fishing, caribou hunts, bison hunts—no one’s done that yet. The thresholds that are being proposed by the government and the energy industry are for ecosystem stabilities, not for the sustainability of cultural rights.”

The ACFN has emerged as the highest-profile nation to oppose the development, becoming the subject and beneficiary of Neil Young’s “Honor the Treaties” benefit tour last year, but it is only one part of a growing movement. The range of Healing Walk participants was a testament to this: it included not only First Nations people throughout Alberta but also activists along the veins of the tar sands infrastructure, from the British Columbia coastline (connected to Alberta via the Kinder Morgan pipeline and, potentially, the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline) to Toronto (through which the aging Enbridge Line 9 pipeline passes). Also present were nonindigenous activists from the Gulf Coast and Bay Area, who are battling the transportation of tar sands crude to refineries in their regions via the Keystone XL pipeline and by rail.

The irony is that the Keystone XL pipeline is crucial for tar sands expansion precisely because of this movement. For a real return on government and energy industry investments, tar sands oil must be transported to the coasts and sold on the global market—but Canada’s existing tar sands infrastructure is already at capacity, and the growing success of indigenous-led resistance makes the construction of mega-pipelines increasingly unlikely. The Keystone XL pipeline expansion, acting as a pressure valve, would enable further development. But at the same time, tar sands oil is already being shipped via rail to other refineries throughout the United States—and while rail is a far more dangerous means of transport (as evidenced by the catastrophic derailment in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, last year, which destroyed the town center and killed forty-two people), its use will likely increase if the Keystone XL pipeline expansion isn’t approved.

Because the infrastructure of extraction sprawls beyond national borders, resistance has followed suit. Activists and residents all along the Keystone XL route regularly converge on Washington, DC, while 210 Bay Area protesters were arrested on the one-year anniversary of a 2012 fire at Chevron’s Richmond refinery, a location in the Bay Area already receiving tar sands oil. But this isn’t simply a case of NIMBY. US activists recognize that resisting the giants of finance and oil requires an international approach: every major US oil corporation has a stake in the Alberta tar sands, and the Koch brothers are the largest non-Canadian stakeholders. Meanwhile, the indigenous residents of Ecuador’s Amazon jungle are pursuing a lawsuit against Chevron for environmental damages in a Canadian court.

“We have alliances across the country, we have treaty territories that are interconnected, and we’re facing a government that wants to bring this toxic commodity to the ports. It’s got to pass through our territory and cross our lands—but they’ve got to get past us first,” said Grand Chief Derek Nepinak of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, when I spoke to him on the sidelines of the walk. Nepinak, somber and burly, is the leading figure behind the new National Treaty Alliance, whose agenda is to assert native treaty rights in the service of indigenous sovereignty.

“The reality is that political representation is not out there anymore,” Nepinak said. “The time is now to rekindle the alliances.”

* * *

Several hours south of the Athabasca tar sands are the Cold Lake deposits, which overlap the traditional territory of the Beaver Lake Creek Nation in central Alberta. BLCN member Crystal Lameman led the Healing Walk caravan along with women from various Alberta nations, offering prayers to heal the land and spirits along the way. “I remember seeing it twenty-five years ago, but that’s when it wasn’t so bad,” Lameman said of the development on BLCN territory. Her uncle Al Lameman, the BLCN’s chief for thirty-five years, took her to see the seismic lines when she was a little girl. “No one knew it was as bad as it’s gotten in the last ten or fifteen years,” Lameman added.

The Cold Lake tar sands are one of the frontiers of Alberta’s tar sands development. Unlike the extraction in the Athabasca region, most of the Cold Lake deposits are part of the 80 percent of Alberta’s tar sands that cannot be extracted through mining, instead requiring in situ (on-site) drilling methods that—at least for now—involve injecting high-pressure steam into the ground. The energy industry claims that these methods are safer and less environmentally destructive, as they forgo the need for open-pit mines, energy- and water-intensive upgrading facilities, or tailings ponds. But they are far from fail-proof: Canadian Natural Resources Limited (CNRL) still hasn’t plugged a leak that began on its Primrose site, in BLCN traditional territory, in May of 2013.

Because in situ development occurs largely out of sight, it doesn’t elicit the same visceral reaction as the devastation caused by mining. Its residual effects linger, however. The CNRL leak killed many dozens of animals, but well before it occurred, members of the BLCN had already noticed a decline in the number of animals they hunted and trapped. A 2010 University of Alberta study showed that caribou herds on the BLCN’s traditional hunting grounds had dropped by 70 percent since 1996.

As Lameman noted, “2008 was the turning point in the whole Treaty 6 and 8 area [which covers much of Alberta], because that was the time that the ACFN filed their lawsuit.” It was also the year that the BLCN initiated its own lawsuit against the federal and provincial government and the British crown for issuing over 20,000 permits on its traditional territory, which the BLCN argues violated its treaty rights. In 2010 or 2011, “everyone really started to talk about all of this together,” Lameman said, adding that she began working with Deranger in 2011. “And then, thanks to Harper—well, really, he signed his own warrant.”

The BLCN lawsuit is set to go to trial and will take on the cumulative effects of tar sands development (not merely the soundness of individual projects), along with the government’s lax regulatory mechanisms and lack of transparency around project approval and development. “We have a right to give our informed consent,” Lameman said. “Our consent means our permission, and we will define what that consent looks like.” Already, the community has started to see some results: “Since we launched the litigation,” Lameman added, “industry comes to us [sooner] because they don’t want to deal with us later.”

The energy industry has also begun to recognize the advantages of consulting First Nations at earlier stages, rather than investing in projects that could ultimately be shut down. “My Uncle Al said, ‘I’m not only going to take the federal government to court—I’m going to take them all to court! Nobody is going to try to get away with anything,’” Lameman recalled. “He knew that they were going to try to pass the buck to each other.”

* * *

The day after the Healing Walk, I drove forty-five minutes north of Fort McMurray to Fort McKay, a 500-person hamlet that is home to what many in the energy industry consider the model First Nations community. The Fort McKay First Nation inhabits the center of the Athabasca tar sands, and it is boxed in on all sides by industry development so that, despite being located right on the Athabasca River, all of the community’s drinking water must be trucked in. Nevertheless, the FMFN has grown wealthy over the last three decades by providing support services to tar sands companies through the FMFN-owned Fort McKay Group of Companies, and it is known for encouraging further development.

I met FMFN Chief Jim Boucher in his impeccable corner office in the center of town, lined with windows overlooking the river. From where we sat, Boucher pointed to a forested hill in the distance where he had lived as a child, back when there were no roads or electricity, the river water was drinkable, and everyone lived off the land. In 1963, his life began to change: Boucher, who was then 12, left his grandfather’s cabin one day to check on snares he had just set the previous day, only to find a clearing in the woods and men working with heavy machinery where his snares had been. This was where the Syncrude site is today. Needless to say, Boucher lost all his snares. Soon after, Syncrude bulldozed his grandfather’s cabin. No one informed his grandfather, as this was simply how business was carried out: the government and the energy industry struck deals between themselves and went ahead with their plans, bypassing any consideration of the community.

Before long, people began to notice the changes: something was wrong with the fish, which tasted of oil; the snow they melted in wintertime for drinking water was now covered in soot; and the river water made people sick. The community spoke out about the destruction but was ignored. As Boucher grew into Fort McKay’s outspoken young radical, he was sent to represent the FMFN at regulatory hearings, where he castigated the government and the energy industry for wantonly destroying his community’s livelihood and health without just compensation for the damage. When no one registered opposition to new projects on FMFN land, Boucher helped set up road blockades to force the energy industry to negotiate.

It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that everything changed in Fort McKay. Although two decades of development had polluted the ecosystem, making it impossible to live off the land, the community had at least been able to rely on the trapping economy to make a comfortable living. It was when animal rights activists in Europe succeeded in marginalizing the fur trade that Fort McKay found itself with no choice but to cooperate with the energy industry. In 1985, the FMFN founded the Fort McCay Group of Companies. Today, Boucher is encouraging in situ development in the region, which he considers to be safe.

“We fought for a long time to preserve our way of life,” Boucher told me. “We had a lot of discussion in our community about what our future was, and a lot of people were involved. We knew that our way of life was under threat.”

The nation’s relationship with the energy industry has not been without contention: earlier this year, the FMFN dropped a lawsuit against the Dover oil sands project it had filed two years earlier, in which the FMFN had demanded a twenty-kilometer buffer zone to protect the Moose Lake reserve, a site it considers integral to the community’s health and cultural survival. The details of the agreement have been kept under wraps, but Boucher describes it as a victory—despite not having won the buffer zone. He claims that the company has “agreed not to come within a certain distance,” and that ten other companies within the zone have agreed to consult the FMFN on all projects to ensure that their impacts will be minimal. In some cases, “the community will signal to them that they will not be allowed to proceed,” Boucher said. “We’ll be continually involved in the process for the next thirty years.”

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When I asked Healing Walk participants what they thought about this Dover agreement, many argued that Boucher had sold out and was essentially providing the energy industry with a social license to operate. But not everyone felt that way.

“Don’t think they didn’t try to make a stink about it,” Deranger said. “They tried to say these projects were destructive, but tar sands were not a hot topic then. That community basically got destroyed, and no one batted an eyelash—not anyone in the environmental movement, not anyone anywhere. When consultation and accommodation first started happening in the late ’90s and early 2000s, the only thing they really had left to do was to be compensated.”

* * *

Tar sands development may be the source of great wealth, but it was Fort McKay’s great misfortune to be located right at its epicenter, and therefore one of the first communities to have been engulfed by development. The ACFN and BLCN still lie on the frontiers of tar sands development, but even they have little choice but to engage with the energy industry, as severing ties completely would amount to economic suicide.

Like the FMFN, the ACFN also provides support services to the energy industry and has sought funding from it for green projects and cultural programs that will reduce its economic dependence on the tar sands. As the ACFN negotiates these deals, it is also trying to prevent the energy companies from capitalizing on them and framing the deals as acts of generosity. As native communities win greater power over project approval and development, the challenge will be to avoid providing the energy industry with a social license to operate.

At the same time that it is seeking funding from the energy industry, the ACFN has also rejected the core federal funding provided to all First Nations, which the Harper government has tied to their acceptance of legislation rolling back environmental protections. These are the same pieces of legislation that sparked the Idle No More movement. Cognizant, perhaps, of how Fort McKay’s current predicament represents its own possible future if it doesn’t act, the ACFN is holding firm.

“They’ve already destroyed a lot. We’re not giving them license to do more,” Deranger said. “We’re saying, ‘You should stop doing that, and you should compensate us for the damage that you’ve done, so that we can figure a way out of this.’”