As sky-high rents and a housing shortage become major issues in the 2024 presidential election, the U.S. Justice Department has sued software company RealPage, alleging its algorithm enabled landlords nationwide to collude in raising rents on tenants. The DOJ says the price-fixing scheme has impacted millions of renters across the United States. ProPublica reporter Heather Vogell, whose investigation first exposed RealPage, says as much as 70% of big apartment buildings in some neighborhoods are owned by property managers using RealPage, with landlords seeing the software “as a way to have a rising tide that lifts all boats.” We also speak with tenant rights organizer Tara Raghuveer, who says RealPage is guilty of “some of the grossest, most extractive business practices” documented in recent years, but the firm is hardly alone. “For so much of the market which is a catastrophic failure, landlords’ business model is predicated on tenants’ instability,” says Raghuveer.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
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Ten months after Georgia officials said they would take steps to ensure that counties were correctly handling massive numbers of challenges to voter registrations, neither the secretary of state’s office nor the State Election Board has done so.
Instead of fixing the problem, the Republican-controlled Georgia legislature passed SB 189 at the end of March. The bill’s authors claim that it will help prevent voting fraud, while voting rights advocates warn that it could make the issue worse. Gov. Brian Kemp signed it into law on Monday.
“I see this as being pro-America, pro-accuracy, pro-transparency and pro-election integrity,” state Rep. John LaHood said of the bill, which he worked to help pass. “I don’t see it being” about voter suppression “whatsoever.”
When it takes effect in July, SB 189 will make it easier for Georgia residents to use questionable evidence when challenging fellow residents’ voter registrations. Voting rights activists also claim that the law could lead county officials to believe they can approve bulk challenges closer to election dates.
“It’s bad policy and bad law, and will open the floodgates to bad challenges,” said Caitlin May, a voting rights attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, which has threatened to sue over what it says is the law’s potential to violate the NVRA.
ProPublica previously reported on how just six right-wing advocates challenged the voter registrations of 89,000 Georgians following the 2021 passage of a controversial law that enabled residents to file unlimited voter challenges. We also revealed that county election officials may have been systematically approving challenges too close to election dates, which would violate the NVRA.
The Georgia secretary of state’s office said at the time that it was “thankful” for information provided by ProPublica, that it had been working on “uniform standards for voter challenges” and that it had “asked the state election board to provide rules” to help election officials handle the challenges. And the chair of the State Election Board told ProPublica last year that though the board hadn’t yet offered rules due to the demands of the 2022 election, “now that the election is over, we intend to do that.”
With the new law soon to be in effect, the State Election Board is determining its next steps. “We’re going to probably have to try and provide some instruction telling” election officials how to respond to SB 189, said John Fervier, who was appointed chair in January after the former chair stepped down. “I don’t know if that will come from the State Election Board or from the secretary of state’s office. But we’re one day past the signing of the legislation, so it’s still too early for me to comment on what kind of instruction will go out at this point.”
Mike Hassinger, a public information officer for the secretary of state’s office, said in a statement that it falls to the State Election Board to review laws and come up with rules. “Once the board moves forward with that process we are more than happy to extend help to rule making,” Hassinger said.
Conservative organizations have been vocal about their plans to file numerous challenges to voter registrations this year, providing training and other resources to help Georgians do so. Activists and Georgia Republican Party leadership publicly celebrated the passage of SB 189, with the GOP chair telling the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that this year’s legislative session was “a home run for those of us concerned about election integrity.”
But what has not gotten as much attention is how individuals who were involved in producing massive numbers of voter challenges managed to shape SB 189.
Jason Frazier, who in 2023 was a Republican nominee to the Fulton County election board, challenged the registrations of nearly 10,000 people in Fulton County, part of the Democratic stronghold of Atlanta.
(Cheney Orr for ProPublica)
Courtney Kramer, the former executive director of True the Vote, a conservative organization that announced it was filing over 360,000 challenges in Georgia after the 2020 presidential election, played an instrumental role in getting the bill passed. She was the co-chair of the Election Confidence Task Force, a committee of the Georgia Republican Party that provided sample language to legislators crafting SB 189. An internal party email reviewed by ProPublica thanked Kramer for her dedication in helping bring “us to the final stages of pushing essential election integrity reform through the legislature.” Kramer said in a statement that “my goal was to restore confidence in Georgia’s elections process” and to “make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.”
Jason Frazier, who ProPublica previously found was one of the state’s six most prolific challengers, served on the Election Confidence Task Force. Frazier did not respond to requests for comment.
In late July, William Duffey, who was then the chair of Georgia’s State Election Board, was working on a paper to update county election officials on how to handle voter challenges. But when the board met in August 2023, a large crowd of right-wing activists packed the room, and dozens of people castigated the board for defending the legitimacy of the 2020 election. One mocked a multicultural invocation with which Duffey had started the meeting, declaring, “The only thing you left out was satanism!” A right-wing news outlet accused “the not so honorable Judge Duffey” of hiding “dirt” on the corruption of the 2020 election.
Less than a month later, Duffey stepped down. He denied that activists had driven him out, telling ProPublica that pressure from such activists “comes with the job.” But, he explained, the volunteer position had been taking “70% of my waking hours,” and “I wanted to get back to things for which I had scoped out my retirement.”
According to two sources knowledgeable about the board’s workings, who asked for anonymity to discuss confidential board matters, Duffey had been the primary force behind updating the rules about voter challenges, and without him, the effort stalled. One source also said that the board had realized that Republican legislators planned to rewrite voter-challenge laws, and members wanted to see what they would do.
In January 2024, Republican legislators began working on those bills. The one that succeeded, SB 189, introduces two especially important changes that would help challengers, according to voting rights activists.
First, it says a dataset kept by the U.S. Postal Service to track address changes provides sufficient grounds for election officials to approve challenges, if that data is backed up by secondary evidence from governmental sources. Researchers have found the National Change of Address dataset to be unreliable in establishing a person’s residence, as there are many reasons a person could be listed as living outside of Georgia but could still legally vote there. ProPublica found in 2023 that counties frequently dismissed challenges because of that unreliability. And voting rights activists claim that the secondary sources SB 189 specifies include swaths of unreliable data.
“My worry is” that the bill “will cause a higher success rate for the challenges,” said Anne Gray Herring, a policy analyst for nonprofit watchdog group Common Cause Georgia.
The new bill also states that starting 45 days before an election, county election boards cannot make a determination on a challenge. Advocates have expressed concerns that counties will interpret the law to mean that they can approve mass, or systematic, challenges up until 45 days before an election. The NVRA prohibits systematic removal of voters within 90 days of an election, and election boards commonly dismissed challenges that likely constituted systematic removal within the 90-day window, ProPublica previously found.
When True the Vote was challenging voters in the aftermath of the 2020 election, a judge issued a restraining order against the challenges for violating the 90-day window.
Whether SB 189 violates the NVRA could be settled in court, according to voting rights advocates and officials. On Tuesday, after SB 189 was signed, Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for the Georgia secretary of state, disputed on social media that the new law would make voter challenges easier. But months earlier, he said that imprecision in the voter challenges process could lead to legal problems.
“When you do loose data matching, you get a lot of false positives,” Sterling said, testifying about voter list maintenance before the Senate committee that would pass a precursor to SB 189. “And when you get a lot of false positives and then move on them inside the NVRA environment, that’s when you get sued.”
This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Doug Bock Clark.
Welcome to the Gaslit Nation State of the Union Super Special! This episode has everything! Suge Knight dissing Diddy at the 1995 Source Awards! World War II era journalist Dorothy Thompson’s warnings about Katie Britt! A dictator loving pope! George W. Bush’s pandora’s box of evil! A smirking Russian oligarch on the Oscars’ stage! You’ve never heard a state of our union analysis, and where we must go from here, quite like this.
Terrell Starr of the essential Black Diplomats Podcast and Substack joins Andrea to roast Katie Britt and her antiChrist diamond cross and what it says about the GOP’s Christofascist war against our democracy. The conversation includes the history of white women like Britt enforcing the genocide of slavery, and Andrea and Terrell accidently calling Steve McQueen’s masterpiece film Seven Years a Slave! (Yes, we now recall it’s 12 Years a Slave!) Andrea shares the story of how she once went undercover as a self-hating Republican woman at a GOP fundraiser and almost got caught by being the only woman who dared to eat food!
Our bonus this week, for subscribers at the Truth-teller level and higher, exposes the Kremlin Caucus and their financial backers. That episode will feature Olga Lautman and Monique Camarra of the Kremlin File podcast. To our supporters at the Democracy Defender level and higher, submit your questions for our upcoming Q&A! We always love hearing from you! Thank you to everyone who supports the show – we could not make Gaslit Nation without you!
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Thank you to the sponsor of this week’s episode! Andrea got to try Factor, and now her listeners can, too, with this special deal! Head to FACTORMEALS.com/gaslit50 and use code “gaslit50” to get 50% off. That’s code “gaslit50” at FACTORMEALS.com/gaslit50 to get 50% off!
“According to respected polls,” Ira Shapiro writes at The Hill, “public approval of the Supreme Court has dropped precipitously to the lowest level in the 50 years that it has been measured.” And not, he cautions, not just to recent revelations concerning the less than ethical (those are my polite words for “bribe-accepting”) behavior on More
How to solve the territorial disputes in the South China Sea that have flummoxed diplomats for decades and stoked fears of superpower conflict?
Actually, it’s quite simple, according to British scholar Bill Hayton. Just acknowledge that the current occupiers of each feature have the best claim to sovereignty over it.
Hayton, associate fellow in the Asia-Pacific Program at Chatham House, a U.K. think-tank, shared his views in a recent commentary in “Perspective,” a publication of the Singapore-based ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute.
He argues that researchers now “know enough about the history of the South China Sea to resolve the competing territorial claims to the various rocks and reefs.”
The basic facts of the South China Sea disputes are well-known. Six parties – Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam – have competing territorial claims. China holds the biggest claim, up to 90 percent of the sea, demarcated by a so-called nine-dash line. It says it has historical rights to the area – a position rejected by an international tribunal in 2016 that Beijing has refused to acknowledge. China’s stance has also put it at loggerheads with Western powers, particularly the U.S.
The disputes are not just about claims to the tiny islets and reefs scattered across the South China Sea, but also claims to jurisdiction over maritime zones associated with these features.
Because of that, a seventh country, Indonesia, also has a stake. Although it does not regard itself as a party to the South China Sea dispute, China claims historic rights to parts of the sea overlapping Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone.
Hayton says that of the six formal claimants, all claim at least one islet, and “a few islets are claimed by at least five states.” The rival claims have always been thought to be “too complicated to ever sort out.”
“There are too many rocks and reefs, too many claimants, too much history. Trying to understand and disentangle all the overlapping claims is just impossible, or so people thought,” said Hayton.
“I don’t think that’s true,” he said.
“Territorial issues in the South China Sea only started in the beginning of the 20th century so you don’t have to look at thousands of years of history.”
The Chinese-built base at Fiery Cross Reef in the disputed Spratly Islands, pictured in an Aug. 20, 2021, satellite image. Credit: Planet Labs Inc.
The role of the International Court of Justice
“The real problem is different claimants have framed their claims to claims to island groups. It would be very hard to try to work out who has the best claim to the whole island group,” Hayton explained.
China and Vietnam, for example, claim the whole of the Paracel and Spratly island chains.
“But once you try to disentangle and desegregate the claims and look at who has the best claim to specific features, then things become a lot easier.”
“No particular country, or state or regime ever controlled the whole of the South China Sea,” he said.
In Hayton’s opinion, breaking down expansive claims to entire island groups into specific claims to named features would open a route to compromise and the resolution of the disputes.
The scholar pointed out that there have been successful precedents in Southeast Asia. Indonesia and Malaysia resolved their dispute over the islands of Ligitan and Sipadan in 2002; as did Malaysia and Singapore over three sets of uninhabited rocks in the Singapore Straits in 2008. In both cases, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) played an important role.
“By ruling out vague claims to sovereignty “from time immemorial” and demanding specific evidence of physical acts of administration, the ICJ also gave the South China Sea claimants a route out of their impasse,” Hayton suggested.
The historical evidence of physical acts of administration on the disputed rocks and reefs suggests, with a few exceptions, that the current occupiers of each feature have the best claim to sovereignty over it, according to the British scholar.
The main exception would be the Paracel Islands where Vietnam occupied about a half until China took over in 1974 after a bloody battle that saw 74 Vietnamese soldiers killed.
“Southeast Asian states have an interest in recognising each other’s de facto occupation of specific features and then presenting a united position to China,” Hayton added.
In the case some countries are unwilling to make use of the ICJ and international law, he suggested that non-governmental organisations could get involved to create a so-called ‘Track Two Tribunal’. Track two typically describes informal or unofficial discussions by people outside of government to help find solutions to complex diplomatic issues.
Hayton said they could “collect rival pieces of evidence, test the claimants’ legal arguments, and present the likely outcomes of any future international court hearing to the claimants and their publics.”
A file photo showing Vietnamese activists during a gathering to commemorate the 42nd anniversary of China’s occupation of the disputed Paracels in the South China Sea, in Hanoi, January 19, 2016. China took full control of the Paracels in 1974 after a naval showdown with Vietnam. Credit: Reuters
‘Difficult tasks’
Hayton, however, admitted that the process would not be easy.
“Populations in different countries would be claiming that this is some terrible sell-out but frankly, all of the countries are working on the basis that this is the status quo that they’re going to accept. They need to turn that into a political commitment,” he said.
Hayton’s proposal “would have merit in an ideal world,” said Mark Valencia, a scholar at the Chinese National Institute for South China Sea Studies.
“But unfortunately we do not live in an ideal world and nationalist-infused domestic politics would likely prove a fatal stumbling block to acceptance and implementation of this proposal,” Valencia said, adding that most politicians in Southeast Asian countries “would try to stay as far away as possible.”
The maritime analyst also warned that since China would not accept and adhere to a formal arbitration ruling against it for maritime space, “it is highly unlikely to accept the verdict of an unofficial Track Two Tribunal regarding territory.”
Furthermore, the idea that each claimant keeps what it currently occupies and drops its claims to other features has been proposed before without any takers, he said.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.
Need a reason to feel hopeful? We’ve got 50. The 2021 Grist 50 list has arrived, and it’s chock-full of inspiring, brilliant, innovative, and deeply hopeful people — we call them Fixers. These folks know a better world is possible, and they’re putting in the work to make it happen today.
Check out the 2021 list. If you’re feeling inspired, we’d love to hear your nominations for who should be honored next year.
Women around the globe bear the brunt of climate disaster. They are also the ones driving some of the most innovative and successful solutions. This International Women’s Day, Fix hosted an Instagram Live convo between two fabulous femmes and climate communicators: Grist 50 Fixers Maeve Higgins and Thanu Yakupitiyage took to IG to school us on artistic expression, immigration justice, and female leadership and ingenuity in the climate movement.
Maeve is a comic, writer, and co-host of the Mothers of Invention podcast. Thanu is an activist, DJ, and U.S. communications director at 350.org. Their whole conversation is fire — and one we highly recommend watching — but we’ve pulled together a few highlights here for your reading pleasure.
The following excerpts have been edited for length and clarity.
On their chosen art forms
Thanu: For me, DJ-ing is very much about joy. It’s about creating spaces to envision the world we want to see. Ten years ago, when I started in the immigrant rights movement, I often found that it was intense, policy-oriented work. That’s true of a lot of the social justice work that I do. We don’t always think, “OK, what are we fighting for?”
When I DJ, I curate spaces particularly for queer folks, for people of color, for immigrants to connect. It’s about building the world we’re fighting for — I feel an arts practice helps to do that. And I love comedy! I would love to know, for you, what that has to do with climate.
Maeve: That’s so funny, because that is what happened — what you mentioned about joy and levity being a crucial part of what a future would look like. I write about immigration, too, and I’m an immigrant myself. Moving to the U.S. as a white person from Europe really got me curious about other people’s experience, particularly if they’re not white and European. I think a lot of migration stories and climate stories are told like, “Here’s a victim, here’s a person whose life is made up of sadness and tragedy,” and that’s dehumanizing. Humor is a way of returning what’s already in people’s lives. No matter how dark things get, you’re going to giggle at a funeral. Your humanity is going to bubble up in some way.
On the right to migrate
Thanu: There’s a lot of updating that needs to happen to global immigration policy. When thinking about external migration, we have to think about the role of the United States, of Canada, of Europe, in creating this climate crisis. All of the most polluting industries are from the West. We have to connect climate to imperialism and colonialism, and to the right of communities from the Global South to be able to migrate for their safety and their prosperity.
Maeve: I really connect with that. Talking about this and explaining it to people is valuable work, and I love how you do that. I worry about the message that climate is a threat to national security. I don’t agree with that messaging, because it’s fear-based. What’s a good way to discuss this, and make it known?
Thanu: That framing is super dangerous. I actually think we have to be careful when people say governments should call a climate emergency — I’m like, “Hold up. Let’s actually think about what a national emergency entails. In a national emergency, borders are shut down and communities are oppressed.”
Maeve: That’s exactly how Trump created the “Remain in Mexico” program.
Thanu: Exactly. When it’s put in a national security frame, it’s actually super racist. It stops Black and brown communities from being able to cross borders. I think it’s important not to use the trope of “We have to do something about climate, because otherwise a billion people are going to migrate.” From my perspective, migration is a human right. We need to focus on the industries that have caused the climate crisis, not the vulnerable communities that are moving.
On International Women’s Day
Maeve: We know that the people who are affected first and worst by climate chaos are women. There’s a balance here, where you don’t want to be too prescriptive, especially with language, but you also want to point out that this is really important. On our podcast, Mothers of Invention, we honor the fact that women and femme people are so often the ones coming up with solutions in their communities and outside of their communities. That was kind of an exciting revelation for me, to be honest.
Thanu: That’s exactly right. When we think about the climate crisis, it’s often women who are also holding down the family dynamics, ensuring that their families and communities have food. And when you think about the places most impacted by the climate crisis, whether it’s parts of Africa or South Asia or the Pacific islands, it’s often women and femmes that are trying to figure out how we move from crisis and chaos to resilience and mitigation. And that’s what I love about your podcast, how y’all really center those solutions.
Maeve: There’s another podcast I’ve been listening to called Hot Take — it both enrages and energizes me. One of the hosts is a hardcore investigative journalist, Amy Westervelt, who’s been writing on climate for years and really has got the goods. The other host, Mary Heglar, is an absolutely gorgeous writer. Their podcast is giving me life at the moment. Do you have heroic femmes and women doing work in this space that you’d like to shout out?
Thanu: My friend Céline Semaan from The Slow Factory talks a lot about climate and fashion. And a lot of the climate youth, like Xiye Bastida and Helena Gualinga and Jamie Margolin — there are so many amazing women, femmes, queer folks who are thinking about climate and its intersections. Young people really give me energy. I think they understand the connections here, and also are able to root things in joy.
I don’t do climate work out of fear. I totally recognize that people are fearful. But I think that this year has reinforced to me why we need compassion and kindness and love. This is a rough and tough world. And I’m not fighting because of fear — I’m fighting because we deserve more than this.
Women around the globe bear the brunt of climate disaster. They are also the ones driving some of the most innovative and successful solutions. This International Women’s Day, Fix hosted an Instagram Live convo between two fabulous femmes and climate communicators: Grist 50 Fixers Maeve Higgins and Thanu Yakupitiyage took to IG to school us on artistic expression, immigration justice, and female leadership and ingenuity in the climate movement.
Maeve is a comic, writer, and co-host of the Mothers of Invention podcast. Thanu is an activist, DJ, and U.S. communications director at 350.org. Their whole conversation is fire — and one we highly recommend watching — but we’ve pulled together a few highlights here for your reading pleasure.
The following excerpts have been edited for length and clarity.
On their chosen art forms
Thanu: For me, DJ-ing is very much about joy. It’s about creating spaces to envision the world we want to see. Ten years ago, when I started in the immigrant rights movement, I often found that it was intense, policy-oriented work. That’s true of a lot of the social justice work that I do. We don’t always think, “OK, what are we fighting for?”
When I DJ, I curate spaces particularly for queer folks, for people of color, for immigrants to connect. It’s about building the world we’re fighting for — I feel an arts practice helps to do that. And I love comedy! I would love to know, for you, what that has to do with climate.
Maeve: That’s so funny, because that is what happened — what you mentioned about joy and levity being a crucial part of what a future would look like. I write about immigration, too, and I’m an immigrant myself. Moving to the U.S. as a white person from Europe really got me curious about other people’s experience, particularly if they’re not white and European. I think a lot of migration stories and climate stories are told like, “Here’s a victim, here’s a person whose life is made up of sadness and tragedy,” and that’s dehumanizing. Humor is a way of returning what’s already in people’s lives. No matter how dark things get, you’re going to giggle at a funeral. Your humanity is going to bubble up in some way.
On the right to migrate
Thanu: There’s a lot of updating that needs to happen to global immigration policy. When thinking about external migration, we have to think about the role of the United States, of Canada, of Europe, in creating this climate crisis. All of the most polluting industries are from the West. We have to connect climate to imperialism and colonialism, and to the right of communities from the Global South to be able to migrate for their safety and their prosperity.
Maeve: I really connect with that. Talking about this and explaining it to people is valuable work, and I love how you do that. I worry about the message that climate is a threat to national security. I don’t agree with that messaging, because it’s fear-based. What’s a good way to discuss this, and make it known?
Thanu: That framing is super dangerous. I actually think we have to be careful when people say governments should call a climate emergency — I’m like, “Hold up. Let’s actually think about what a national emergency entails. In a national emergency, borders are shut down and communities are oppressed.”
Maeve: That’s exactly how Trump created the “Remain in Mexico” program.
Thanu: Exactly. When it’s put in a national security frame, it’s actually super racist. It stops Black and brown communities from being able to cross borders. I think it’s important not to use the trope of “We have to do something about climate, because otherwise a billion people are going to migrate.” From my perspective, migration is a human right. We need to focus on the industries that have caused the climate crisis, not the vulnerable communities that are moving.
On International Women’s Day
Maeve: We know that the people who are affected first and worst by climate chaos are women. There’s a balance here, where you don’t want to be too prescriptive, especially with language, but you also want to point out that this is really important. On our podcast, Mothers of Invention, we honor the fact that women and femme people are so often the ones coming up with solutions in their communities and outside of their communities. That was kind of an exciting revelation for me, to be honest.
Thanu: That’s exactly right. When we think about the climate crisis, it’s often women who are also holding down the family dynamics, ensuring that their families and communities have food. And when you think about the places most impacted by the climate crisis, whether it’s parts of Africa or South Asia or the Pacific islands, it’s often women and femmes that are trying to figure out how we move from crisis and chaos to resilience and mitigation. And that’s what I love about your podcast, how y’all really center those solutions.
Maeve: There’s another podcast I’ve been listening to called Hot Take — it both enrages and energizes me. One of the hosts is a hardcore investigative journalist, Amy Westervelt, who’s been writing on climate for years and really has got the goods. The other host, Mary Heglar, is an absolutely gorgeous writer. Their podcast is giving me life at the moment. Do you have heroic femmes and women doing work in this space that you’d like to shout out?
Thanu: My friend Céline Semaan from The Slow Factory talks a lot about climate and fashion. And a lot of the climate youth, like Xiye Bastida and Helena Gualinga and Jamie Margolin — there are so many amazing women, femmes, queer folks who are thinking about climate and its intersections. Young people really give me energy. I think they understand the connections here, and also are able to root things in joy.
I don’t do climate work out of fear. I totally recognize that people are fearful. But I think that this year has reinforced to me why we need compassion and kindness and love. This is a rough and tough world. And I’m not fighting because of fear — I’m fighting because we deserve more than this.
If you haven’t heard, Fix recently launched a cli-fi writing contest. We are over-the-moon excited about it. Fiction writers have a knack for creating compelling, perception-shifting windows into alternate worlds and making complex issues approachable — and personal. That’s exactly what we hope to do with Imagine 2200: Climate fiction for future ancestors.
Anyone (even you!) can submit a short story that envisions our path to a cleaner, greener, and more equitable world. We’ve enlisted a jaw-droppingly impressive panel of judges to read the best of the submissions and choose the 12 we’ll publish in a digital collection this summer. (Did we mention there’s cash involved? The grand-prize winner will pocket $3,000, with $2,000 and $1,000 going to the second- and third-place winners respectively.)
Sheree Renée Thomas, Adrienne Maree Brown, Morgan Jerkins, and Kiese Laymon know their way around a narrative. Between them, they’ve written more than a dozen books — memoirs, novels, and essay and short story collections that explore race, culture, family, nature, and even time travel. And they’ve earned heaps of awards and distinctions for their outstanding work.
Fix caught up with our illustrious judges to talk about their approaches to climate fiction and other literature, the impact they think it can have, and what they’re hoping to read in Imagine 2200. Their comments have been edited for length and clarity.
Sheree Renée Thomas is a fiction writer, poet, and editor in Memphis. Her works include Nine Bar Blues, Sleeping Under the Tree of Life, and Shotgun Lullabies. Thomas was recently named editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Storytelling is one of the oldest forms of communication. It touches things in us, and it stays in our memories longer, I believe. Art is more vital in these days than ever, as we’re living through a pandemic.
Climate change has been something I have explored in my creative work for a while. It has directly impacted my own family here in Memphis. We used to be able to fish in the Mississippi River, and now that’s not advised. I’m in the middle of a fight to keep an oil pipeline from going through a historic community in South Memphis called Boxtown that was created right after emancipation. People are rallying around that. In the short stories for this contest, I trust that writers are going to look around them and pull up the very real things that are happening in our world right now. Ideas are great, but if you don’t tell me in a way that makes me care about and invest in what happens to the characters, then it’s just so-so.
I think it’s an amazing time for speculative-fiction writers, and it’s so good to see Afrofuturism embraced by a larger community. I’m here for it. So many wonderful writers are adding their voices to the genre. And lots of other creative projects are coming from it — films and animation and graphic novels — and people are using these as case studies for social change in real time. I see it as an open-source code that’s constantly evolving and changing, and that’s the way it should always be.
My advice to writers who are considering submitting: Read your work aloud! It’s an incantation. And it puts the story in a different light. You’ll find some of the missing beats, you’ll find areas you have an opportunity to expand upon. Oh, and send it in on time!
Adrienne Maree Brown is a scholar and activist in Detroit. She is the author of Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism, and co-edited the anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements.
I think it’s difficult in this moment to tell a story about our future that is neither dystopian nor utopian — that’s not some scenario in which we get everyone into a lush green garden and it’s all good, but it’s also not Mad Max Fury Road. Interdependence is going to have to change our trajectory as a species, and I think fiction has to be the place where we try out what that looks like.
I’m very critical of the fiction I write. Every time, I’m like, “I was aiming for Toni Morrison and I landed at The Bachelorette.” But I had good intentions! “The River” is the story that I think comes the closest to cli-fi for me. It is a story about the Detroit River responding to gentrification and climate injustice and fighting back. For me, when I think of climate fiction, when I think of climate justice, I think about partnering with the land. Partnering with the water. Partnering with the air. Partnering with the forces of change that our planet represents — not saving it.
We are heading toward a future in which Black and brown people are the majority in the U.S. — and we are heading toward a future in which climate crisis is guaranteed, based on the behavior we’ve already engaged in. So we are called to be prophets in this moment.
When we did Octavia’s Brood, most of the contributors were non-fiction thinkers, movement thinkers, scholars, academics. And they wrote some of the most prescient, brilliant fiction. So, my advice to writers: Don’t think that it’s outside of the realm of your possibility. We write because we have a critique of the current circumstances. So if you want to change things, here’s the invitation.
Morgan Jerkins is an author and editor in New York City. She wrote This Will Be My Undoing and Wandering in Strange Lands. Her debut novel, Caul Baby, will be released next month.
In this contest, I hope to see stories that focus on Black and brown populations. I hope to see stories that highlight all of the -isms and phobias that have debilitated our society and how they will metastasize with climate change. I also hope people will explore how climate affects us not just on the grand scale, but the granular.
I grew up in New Jersey. This year, I visited my mother for Christmas, and we followed a tradition that she used to follow with her parents: going around the neighborhoods to see the Christmas lights. She noted that it was different this time because there was no snow. That was the first time I thought that not only is the climate changing, perhaps our traditions are changing, too. And tradition, especially familial tradition, is something I have explored in my writing.
I think cli-fi is a flexible term. For me, it means possibility. I think about Octavia Butler’s work — some of the stuff she’s written, we’re living it now. For those of us who read a lot, we understand the power literature wields. Who’s to say writing isn’t a prophecy? Who’s to say that whatever somebody is writing right now might not be the basis for policy proposals in the future?
Ultimately, I hope these stories reveal how our imaginations can help build a better reality. We need to be imaginative about the future and what it could be — not only to serve as a guiding light, but to serve as a balm for these current, difficult times.
Kiese Laymon is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of Heavy and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. His debut novel, Long Division, will be reissued later this year.
My first novel is about Black kids in Mississippi who go into the woods in 2013, 1985, and 1964. (There’s a time-travel element.) One thing I was exploring was environmental degradation. The woods change from green, to brown, to eventually no longer existing. I wanted to subtextually ask the reader, “What does it mean when these green spaces that rural Black children play in disappear? And why? Does it have anything to do with how close these communities are to power plants and incinerators?” I didn’t make that explicit, but I was trying to show it in the way the kids kept asking why the forest was changing.
I think cli-fi as a genre foregrounds climate’s relationship to people, places, things, and culture. I’m really excited about the elastic way this can be interpreted. In Imagine 2200, I hope people write stories from the points of view of things other than humans. I’m interested in post-human stories — maybe somebody wants to write a story from the POV of the climate itself, or a pine tree, or a crawdad, or a possum. I hope people are as creative as possible, and that they use this opportunity to write a story they might have needed permission to try.
I also hope people who don’t think they mess with sci-fi or cli-fi will be encouraged to apply. Sometimes I’ve had the most success while writing a genre that I didn’t particularly like and wanted to renovate. If you are tired of cli-fi, if you are tired of writing, fam, use this as an opportunity to expand, explore, destroy, and wonderfully, beautifully, tenderly build.
Racial justice and climate justice are inseparable. Few would deny this, but that wasn’t always so. For much of its history, the environmental movement has been overwhelmingly white and gave little thought to the impacts pollution and climate change had on people of color and underserved communities. The convergence of the two, which happened no more than a generation ago, came only after the tireless work of activists like Cecil Corbin-Mark.
Corbin-Mark was a towering, didactic man from Harlem who always offered criticism with love. He was equally adept at organizing his neighbors as he was lobbying policymakers. Never afraid to denounce the injustice deeply entrenched in Black and brown communities, much of his life was spent tirelessly battling the colonial mindset so many live under. Growing up in a family actively engaged in the civil rights movement, it’s no surprise that Corbin-Mark became one of the earliest champions of environmental justice, which was a novel, even radical, idea at the time.
For three decades, he demanded justice for underserved and overlooked communities, a campaign he waged until his sudden passing last October at 51. He never stopped getting into what the late civil rights activist Rep. John Lewis would call “good, necessary trouble.”
Even in a year of immeasurable grief for the Black and brown communities grappling with police brutality and a disproportionate share of COVID-19 deaths, Corbin-Mark remained steadfast in the struggle to eliminate toxic pollution, address systemic racism, and implement equitable climate and energy policies. He scored a key victory, too, in helping pass landmark climate legislation that would not only commit his home state of New York to net-zero emissions by 2050, but require at least 35 percent of state energy and climate spending go to pollution-burdened communities.
Corbin-Mark left a legacy that many in the movement, veterans and newcomers alike, will never forget — something three members of the House of Representatives specifically cited when they introduced a resolution honoring the activist for his life’s work. As one of its first employees, Corbin-Mark helped shepherd the growth of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, which was among the earliest organizations to fight environmental racism. Its virtual memorial for Corbin-Mark drew more than 400 people, offering compelling proof of his impact. Many hailed him as a visionary and gifted policy wonk focused on making energy justice the next front in the ongoing campaign for environmental justice.
Among the most lamentable things about his passing is that he didn’t live to see President Biden pass a slew of executive orders centering environmental justice in his climate and economic agendas. Many of Corbin-Mark’s colleagues credit him with helping carve the path that led to such a historic moment. That his life’s work was inextricably tied to the rise of the movement that made it happen is not lost on those who saw him tirelessly defend marginalized communities.
“The time he grew into who he became at WE ACT tracks with how the environmental justice movement has grown,” says 2019 Grist 50 Fixer Kerene Tayloe, director of federal legislative affairs at WE ACT. She tears up recalling Corbin-Mark’s impact on her life. “His ability to understand the importance of policy at the city level, at the state level, and at the federal level was instrumental in changing and preparing us for where we are right now. I just wish he was here to see the day [Biden’s] executive orders came out.”
A movement takes root
Corbin-Mark dedicated most of his life to serving communities of color, particularly fighting against the systemic inequities baked into the daily life of his neighborhood. The disparities are evident in even seemingly minute things: Many people in Harlem — mostly low-income people of color — must endure the pernicious summer heat of New York City, while white and wealthier residents just blocks away sit comfortably in their expensive, air-conditioned apartments.
Bringing these connections to what has historically been a white-dominated movement was never an easy endeavor. About a decade after the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the first battle against environmental racism — though the term didn’t exist until years later — began taking shape. State officials in North Carolina decided to dump soil laced with a carcinogen called polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) at a new hazardous waste landfill in the small, predominantly Black town of Afton.
That incident gave rise to the modern environmental justice movement. Civil rights and environmental activists soon saw a pattern when a similar fight took place in New York City a few years later. City planners unilaterally decided to move a sewage treatment plant slated for an affluent neighborhood to West Harlem. Community leaders rallied opposition to the plant, which led to the creation of WE ACT for Environmental Justice in 1988. Still, the city proceeded with the plan, promising residents that the facility would be odorless and harmless.
It’s a classic act of environmental injustice, the sort of thing activists like Corbin-Mark fought against for decades. When residents of West Harlem started noticing a foul, noxious stench wafting as far as two miles from the plant, WE ACT and the National Resources Defense Council sued the city. The lawsuit was settled in 1993 and provided roughly $1 million in environmental benefit funds, which allowed WE ACT — an all-volunteer organization at the time — to begin paying co-founder and executive director Peggy Shepard and expand her team. Today, the org counts around 20 people in its ranks.
Cecil Corbin-Mark at WE ACT’s 25th anniversary event in 2013.Courtesy of WE ACT
“We decided we’re going to develop our own little NRDC in upper Manhattan,” Shepard said. “When we got the grant from the fund, the first staff person I thought of hiring was Cecil. We basically started the business in our new office, then hired three other people. It was just the five of us for a couple years.”
Vernice Miller-Travis, who cofounded WE ACT with Shepard but later moved to Washington, D.C., was impressed by Corbin-Mark, who was in his 20s at the time. “I could exhale a little, knowing that there was going to be somebody at Peggy’s side, building the organization and doing the work who cared about it as much as I did, and that I didn’t have to be right there on the spot all the time,” she says.
Shepard, who lived three blocks from Corbin-Mark in West Harlem, had met him not long before. She was out and about one Saturday and stumbled upon a block party where Corbin-Mark, who worked in the Bronx district attorney’s office, was telling an audience about environmental stewardship and explaining how the community could address the systemic issues entrenched in their neighborhood.
“I was struck by the passion and the specificity and the articulate message he was giving, so I met him and we stayed in touch,” Shepard said. “His friends and family probably thought he was crazy for leaving his good city job for a startup with ‘environmental justice’ in the name.”
The issue of environmental racism was making its first appearance in national politics when Corbin-Mark joined WE ACT. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order directing federal agencies to consider the environmental and health impacts of their actions on low-income communities of color. While Black environmental activists considered that groundbreaking, systemic inequities like legacy pollution persisted.
Innovation with impact
Corbin-Mark always had a vision coming into focus as people tossed around ideas about implementation and approach. “Our action should not be without strategy,” he often told colleagues (and tweeted at least once). His innovative thinking and ideas are what made him accomplish so much. An exhaustive accounting of his achievements would most likely fill a book, but those who knew him best credit him with advancing more than a dozen state legislative bills addressing toxins. He was also instrumental in getting the first line items in the New York environmental protection fund, now slated for $8 million a year. And, in the months before he died, Corbin-Mark championed several clean-energy programs and initiatives that WE ACT plans to continue pursuing.
Beyond his strong relationships with several state officials, Corbin-Mark regularly forged international relationships while attending climate and environmental events from Brazil to South Africa to Indonesia. Even those who felt challenged by Corbin-Mark’s positions and disagreed with his views admired his passion and mourned his passing.
George Floyd’s killing last summer prompted Corbin-Mark to once again focus most of his energy on highlighting the connections between racial justice and environmental justice. “We have to remember that Cecil was a Black man,” Shepard said. “At the large white organizations, the higher spots don’t generally go to people of color.” The National Black Environmental Justice Network, for which Corbin-Mark served on the steering committee, was resurrected after a 15-month hiatus. Floyd’s final words — “I can’t breathe” — became a rallying cry for racial justice, a sentiment shared by anyone who’s been subjected to environmental racism. After all, African Americans are 79 percent more likely to live in neighborhoods with severe industrial pollution.
Corbin-Mark, Shepard, and other Black environmental justice pioneers long challenged the “white savior” narrative of the historically, and overwhelmingly, white environmental movement. Raya Salter, policy organizer for the New York Renews coalition that helped pass New York’s groundbreaking climate legislation, said Corbin-Mark’s upbringing in Harlem — a community dubbed the heartbeat of the Black story in America — and his role in the environmental justice space are in many ways similar to the Harlem Renaissance.
“He was kind of the James Baldwin of the environmental justice movement, because no matter what or who he encountered, he just always showed dignity and intelligence,” says Salter.
Even Beverly Wright, founder and executive director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice who has, with Shepard, been called the “mother of environmental justice,” echoed the idea when she repeatedly called Corbin-Mark a “renaissance man” during his memorial.
Yet even as the movement he led moved into the mainstream, Corbin-Mark was, as always, looking ahead to the next challenge. He had begun building an “energy justice” movement just before his passing. A growing body of evidence shows that racial covenants and racist city planning policies during the Jim Crow era determined which communities lived near landfills, sewage treatment plants, refineries, and other sources of industrial pollution. If clean energy is to take over the grid, Corbin-Mark questioned whether historically underserved communities would benefit.
His foresight was critical when it came to energy initiatives. A 2017 report by the NAACP outlined how governments should start considering access to energy services a basic human right. Among families living below the poverty level, Black households are more than twice as likely to experience power shut-offs than white ones. This is especially true in New York, where Corbin-Mark started a solar-installation program that would benefit underserved communities, working alongside agencies like city utility Con Edison and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.
“Cecil knew how politics got done and how policies could change,” said Stephan Roundtree, the northeast director at the nonprofit Vote Solar and one of many people Corbin-Mark mentored over the years. “But he was really serious about starting with what people were telling us about their lives, because he knows that’s where a just policy comes from — by really addressing the lived conditions of people on the ground.”
While punctuality was never Corbin-Mark’s strongest suit, he made a lasting impact wherever he went. To people who knew him, it seemed he was always clutching a book in one hand and his phone and keys in the other while walking to the subway station or striding toward a rental car when traveling. Details like that may seem small, even inconsequential, when looking back on the life of a pioneer like Corbin-Mark, but they further humanize a man whose life, actions, and words will serve as a reminder of the political will needed to address institutional racism and inequities woven into the fabric of this nation.
“In a social movement, we build things, we organize, we do policy and advocacy, but not everyone was a visionary,” Miller-Travis said. “Cecil was that kind of person, and we are going to miss him terribly.”
Racial justice and climate justice are inseparable. Few would deny this, but that wasn’t always so. For much of its history, the environmental movement has been overwhelmingly white and gave little thought to the impacts pollution and climate change had on people of color and underserved communities. The convergence of the two, which happened no more than a generation ago, came only after the tireless work of activists like Cecil Corbin-Mark.
Corbin-Mark was a towering, didactic man from Harlem who always offered criticism with love. He was equally adept at organizing his neighbors as he was lobbying policymakers. Never afraid to denounce the injustice deeply entrenched in Black and brown communities, much of his life was spent tirelessly battling the colonial mindset so many live under. Growing up in a family actively engaged in the civil rights movement, it’s no surprise that Corbin-Mark became one of the earliest champions of environmental justice, which was a novel, even radical, idea at the time.
For three decades, he demanded justice for underserved and overlooked communities, a campaign he waged until his sudden passing last October at 51. He never stopped getting into what the late civil rights activist Rep. John Lewis would call “good, necessary trouble.”
Even in a year of immeasurable grief for the Black and brown communities grappling with police brutality and a disproportionate share of COVID-19 deaths, Corbin-Mark remained steadfast in the struggle to eliminate toxic pollution, address systemic racism, and implement equitable climate and energy policies. He scored a key victory, too, in helping pass landmark climate legislation that would not only commit his home state of New York to net-zero emissions by 2050, but require at least 35 percent of state energy and climate spending go to pollution-burdened communities.
Corbin-Mark left a legacy that many in the movement, veterans and newcomers alike, will never forget — something three members of the House of Representatives specifically cited when they introduced a resolution honoring the activist for his life’s work. As one of its first employees, Corbin-Mark helped shepherd the growth of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, which was among the earliest organizations to fight environmental racism. Its virtual memorial for Corbin-Mark drew more than 400 people, offering compelling proof of his impact. Many hailed him as a visionary and gifted policy wonk focused on making energy justice the next front in the ongoing campaign for environmental justice.
Among the most lamentable things about his passing is that he didn’t live to see President Biden pass a slew of executive orders centering environmental justice in his climate and economic agendas. Many of Corbin-Mark’s colleagues credit him with helping carve the path that led to such a historic moment. That his life’s work was inextricably tied to the rise of the movement that made it happen is not lost on those who saw him tirelessly defend marginalized communities.
“The time he grew into who he became at WE ACT tracks with how the environmental justice movement has grown,” says 2019 Grist 50 Fixer Kerene Tayloe, director of federal legislative affairs at WE ACT. She tears up recalling Corbin-Mark’s impact on her life. “His ability to understand the importance of policy at the city level, at the state level, and at the federal level was instrumental in changing and preparing us for where we are right now. I just wish he was here to see the day [Biden’s] executive orders came out.”
A movement takes root
Corbin-Mark dedicated most of his life to serving communities of color, particularly fighting against the systemic inequities baked into the daily life of his neighborhood. The disparities are evident in even seemingly minute things: Many people in Harlem — mostly low-income people of color — must endure the pernicious summer heat of New York City, while white and wealthier residents just blocks away sit comfortably in their expensive, air-conditioned apartments.
Bringing these connections to what has historically been a white-dominated movement was never an easy endeavor. About a decade after the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the first battle against environmental racism — though the term didn’t exist until years later — began taking shape. State officials in North Carolina decided to dump soil laced with a carcinogen called polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) at a new hazardous waste landfill in the small, predominantly Black town of Afton.
That incident gave rise to the modern environmental justice movement. Civil rights and environmental activists soon saw a pattern when a similar fight took place in New York City a few years later. City planners unilaterally decided to move a sewage treatment plant slated for an affluent neighborhood to West Harlem. Community leaders rallied opposition to the plant, which led to the creation of WE ACT for Environmental Justice in 1988. Still, the city proceeded with the plan, promising residents that the facility would be odorless and harmless.
It’s a classic act of environmental injustice, the sort of thing activists like Corbin-Mark fought against for decades. When residents of West Harlem started noticing a foul, noxious stench wafting as far as two miles from the plant, WE ACT and the National Resources Defense Council sued the city. The lawsuit was settled in 1993 and provided roughly $1 million in environmental benefit funds, which allowed WE ACT — an all-volunteer organization at the time — to begin paying co-founder and executive director Peggy Shepard and expand her team. Today, the org counts around 20 people in its ranks.
Cecil Corbin-Mark at WE ACT’s 25th anniversary event in 2013.Courtesy of WE ACT
“We decided we’re going to develop our own little NRDC in upper Manhattan,” Shepard said. “When we got the grant from the fund, the first staff person I thought of hiring was Cecil. We basically started the business in our new office, then hired three other people. It was just the five of us for a couple years.”
Vernice Miller-Travis, who cofounded WE ACT with Shepard but later moved to Washington, D.C., was impressed by Corbin-Mark, who was in his 20s at the time. “I could exhale a little, knowing that there was going to be somebody at Peggy’s side, building the organization and doing the work who cared about it as much as I did, and that I didn’t have to be right there on the spot all the time,” she says.
Shepard, who lived three blocks from Corbin-Mark in West Harlem, had met him not long before. She was out and about one Saturday and stumbled upon a block party where Corbin-Mark, who worked in the Bronx district attorney’s office, was telling an audience about environmental stewardship and explaining how the community could address the systemic issues entrenched in their neighborhood.
“I was struck by the passion and the specificity and the articulate message he was giving, so I met him and we stayed in touch,” Shepard said. “His friends and family probably thought he was crazy for leaving his good city job for a startup with ‘environmental justice’ in the name.”
The issue of environmental racism was making its first appearance in national politics when Corbin-Mark joined WE ACT. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order directing federal agencies to consider the environmental and health impacts of their actions on low-income communities of color. While Black environmental activists considered that groundbreaking, systemic inequities like legacy pollution persisted.
Innovation with impact
Corbin-Mark always had a vision coming into focus as people tossed around ideas about implementation and approach. “Our action should not be without strategy,” he often told colleagues (and tweeted at least once). His innovative thinking and ideas are what made him accomplish so much. An exhaustive accounting of his achievements would most likely fill a book, but those who knew him best credit him with advancing more than a dozen state legislative bills addressing toxins. He was also instrumental in getting the first line items in the New York environmental protection fund, now slated for $8 million a year. And, in the months before he died, Corbin-Mark championed several clean-energy programs and initiatives that WE ACT plans to continue pursuing.
Beyond his strong relationships with several state officials, Corbin-Mark regularly forged international relationships while attending climate and environmental events from Brazil to South Africa to Indonesia. Even those who felt challenged by Corbin-Mark’s positions and disagreed with his views admired his passion and mourned his passing.
George Floyd’s killing last summer prompted Corbin-Mark to once again focus most of his energy on highlighting the connections between racial justice and environmental justice. “We have to remember that Cecil was a Black man,” Shepard said. “At the large white organizations, the higher spots don’t generally go to people of color.” The National Black Environmental Justice Network, for which Corbin-Mark served on the steering committee, was resurrected after a 15-month hiatus. Floyd’s final words — “I can’t breathe” — became a rallying cry for racial justice, a sentiment shared by anyone who’s been subjected to environmental racism. After all, African Americans are 79 percent more likely to live in neighborhoods with severe industrial pollution.
Corbin-Mark, Shepard, and other Black environmental justice pioneers long challenged the “white savior” narrative of the historically, and overwhelmingly, white environmental movement. Raya Salter, policy organizer for the New York Renews coalition that helped pass New York’s groundbreaking climate legislation, said Corbin-Mark’s upbringing in Harlem — a community dubbed the heartbeat of the Black story in America — and his role in the environmental justice space are in many ways similar to the Harlem Renaissance.
“He was kind of the James Baldwin of the environmental justice movement, because no matter what or who he encountered, he just always showed dignity and intelligence,” says Salter.
Even Beverly Wright, founder and executive director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice who has, with Shepard, been called the “mother of environmental justice,” echoed the idea when she repeatedly called Corbin-Mark a “renaissance man” during his memorial.
Yet even as the movement he led moved into the mainstream, Corbin-Mark was, as always, looking ahead to the next challenge. He had begun building an “energy justice” movement just before his passing. A growing body of evidence shows that racial covenants and racist city planning policies during the Jim Crow era determined which communities lived near landfills, sewage treatment plants, refineries, and other sources of industrial pollution. If clean energy is to take over the grid, Corbin-Mark questioned whether historically underserved communities would benefit.
His foresight was critical when it came to energy initiatives. A 2017 report by the NAACP outlined how governments should start considering access to energy services a basic human right. Among families living below the poverty level, Black households are more than twice as likely to experience power shut-offs than white ones. This is especially true in New York, where Corbin-Mark started a solar-installation program that would benefit underserved communities, working alongside agencies like city utility Con Edison and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.
“Cecil knew how politics got done and how policies could change,” said Stephan Roundtree, the northeast director at the nonprofit Vote Solar and one of many people Corbin-Mark mentored over the years. “But he was really serious about starting with what people were telling us about their lives, because he knows that’s where a just policy comes from — by really addressing the lived conditions of people on the ground.”
While punctuality was never Corbin-Mark’s strongest suit, he made a lasting impact wherever he went. To people who knew him, it seemed he was always clutching a book in one hand and his phone and keys in the other while walking to the subway station or striding toward a rental car when traveling. Details like that may seem small, even inconsequential, when looking back on the life of a pioneer like Corbin-Mark, but they further humanize a man whose life, actions, and words will serve as a reminder of the political will needed to address institutional racism and inequities woven into the fabric of this nation.
“In a social movement, we build things, we organize, we do policy and advocacy, but not everyone was a visionary,” Miller-Travis said. “Cecil was that kind of person, and we are going to miss him terribly.”
If you’ve noticed more people rooting around their yards for dandelion greens or picking fruit in the local park, there’s a good chance it’s because of Alexis Nikole Nelson.
On TikTok, Nelson charms her 600,000-odd followers with raps about ethically foraging for ramps (or finding a substitute because, you know, they’re at risk of becoming endangered); tips for telling the difference between Queen Anne’s lace and its evil twin, hemlock; and culinary delights like seaweed panna cotta. It’s enough to make you want to look around your own yard for field onions and hairy bittercress so you can whip up scallion pancakes. Nelson does this all with sustainability in mind, encouraging her followers to eat invasive and pervasive plants.
For the uninitiated, foraging simply means identifying and gathering mushrooms, herbs, nuts, fruits and other food. Sure, you could go to your local grocery store, but foraging offers several advantages beyond being a great social-distancing activity. It means eating with the seasons, adding variety to your diet, and becoming less reliant on the agricultural industrial complex and monocropping that’s led to environmental disasters like the dust bowl.
Nelson’s interest in foraging sprouted during a childhood spent in the family garden. Her mother would often quiz her on plants while Nelson ran around with a toy trowel, digging holes for bulbs. Nelson soon found herself fascinated by the weeds. “The things I was most interested in were the useful plants that were not there on purpose,” she says. “I didn’t completely understand why they weren’t ‘on purpose’ despite being useful.”
After graduating from Ohio State University, Nelson’s hobby approached obsession when she found herself broke while between jobs. Instead of spending six bucks(!) on supermarket greens, she harvested curly dock and wood sorrel to make delicious (and free!) salads. Nelson grew more culinarily adventurous, started composting, and gave more thought to sustainability in the kitchen. She forages for about 10 percent of her food through the winter. Come summer, she’ll go days eating only what she’s found, with the exception of olive oil because, she says, making it herself is a real time-suck.
These days, Nelson calls herself @BlackForager on Instagram and Facebook, because she didn’t see faces that looked like hers. “Because of my reach, I have started finding people who look like me in this space, and that’s been beautiful,” she says. TikTok recently took note, naming her one of its inaugural Black TikTok Trailblazers in February. In the coming year, she’d like to put out longer content on her YouTube channel.
Fix chatted with Nelson about drawing foraging inspiration from the past, dispelling some common misconceptions, and how gathering your own food is a revolutionary act. Her comments have been edited for length and clarity.
Q.How is forging and cooking with what you’ve harvested a historical practice?
A.I love diving into old cookbooks, especially those out of the Appalachian region, because they often focus a lot on making do with what was around. One example that I like to talk about is pokeweed — a plant that is pretty much universally considered a weed, and a noxious one at that.
On the other hand, you have folks like my dad’s side of the family saying, “Excuse me, poke salad is a very popular springtime dish made with pokeweed shoots.” It was just a matter of knowing the process of blanching them to make sure that they are rendered completely safe. Poke salad is a dish that could very easily fall out of the national consciousness if folks who know about it don’t teach their kids about it or commit it to a space where it can stay forever.
I think a lot of us have stories about a grandparent or a parent sharing what is, honestly, ancient knowledge but it isn’t necessarily making the jump from generation to generation. We risk losing a lot of food knowledge, especially food knowledge held by the Indigenous and Black communities.
Nelson picks flowers from a mimosa tree — Albizia julibrissin. Alexis Nikole Nelson
Q.What are some common misconceptions about foraging?
A.The biggest hurdle for a lot of folks is the idea that foraging can happen in city spaces. You just have to make informed decisions. A lot of folks think that I live in the middle of the woods. I don’t. I live on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio.
Foraging is possible for me, but I’m also the kind of weirdo who will ask the parks and rec department questions and do research on parks where gathering things is — I don’t even want to say this — legal. The two types of parks I see are parks where foraging is explicitly illegal and parks where foraging is not mentioned at all.
The next thing a lot of folks have apprehension about is where it is safe to forage. I can’t give everyone an exact answer unless they also happen to live in Columbus. No one wants to do homework and I get it, but I’d also rather be safe than sorry.
A lot of people say, “I’m never going to get to a point where I know as many plants as you, so there’s no point in me starting now,” which is so not true. I think people believe I woke up one day with all of this knowledge. I’m still learning every single day, and I have been doing this for almost two-and-a-half decades.
Q.How do you see foraging as a revolutionary act?
A.Foraging has been a part of Indigenous food ways and the food ways of pretty much every underserved community, whether those people were enslaved or just not very high on the socioeconomic scale.
After the Civil War, it became apparent that it would become harder to keep Black people on plantations as cheap labor. Folks realized that one way of denying Black people other options was to deny them the food ways they could use not only to sustain themselves but to prepare and sell food to others as a way of building wealth — not just surviving, but thriving. That’s when we saw the nation’s first round of laws barring foraging in public spaces. Doing so was a civil offense everywhere in the South until after the Civil War, when it became a criminal offense. That affected Indigenous people, who suddenly had their access to food ways taken away. The law also impacted a lot of poor white people.
For me, being a person of color out in the world foraging is super revolutionary, because it was something that was very intentionally taken out of my ancestors’ hands. We still have a ton of laws discouraging people from foraging despite the fact that the handful of people doing it are not making horrible dents in these natural spaces.
Q.Have you seen more people reclaiming food sovereignty through foraging or gardening?
A.Within the Black community, I’ve seen a huge push for farming as a way of reclaiming food sovereignty. I’ve noticed folks, especially women, like @TheHillbillyAfrican on Instagram, buying swaths of land and taking complete control of their food ways. Teaching farms are showing the next generation of Black children what growing your own food is like, what a balanced diet looks like. They’re getting their hands in the dirt, so they foster a love of this early.
That’s been slowly creeping on the up and up for a really long time, but just in the last two years, I’ve really seen a boom of Black folks saying, “If we’re not going to get included in these conversations about food sovereignty within cities, we’re just going to take care of our own ourselves.”
I’m in a neighborhood that is historically Black. A community garden opened last year. Students from OSU come down and volunteer, but all of the kids from the neighborhood who participate are Black. I love that. Nothing makes me happier than walking down there and being around people who look like me and little kids who are excited to be here, digging in the dirt and learning more about where their food comes from. They’re laying strong foundations for themselves and future generations and they don’t even know it. They’re just having fun.
Every eco-conscious consumer has felt the frustration of trying to make the least climate-ruining decisions. Nothing you buy is really good for the planet — every new purchase carries a carbon cost. So many factors go into determining the environmental and social impact of everything on your shopping list that even the smallest choices can become agonizing. How are you to know whether cotton really is better than polyester? Whether local or organic food is preferable? Whether GMO means anything at all? A mind-boggling array of factors can inform every decision, so for reassurance, people often turn to trusted brands and recognizable — or at least understandable —labels.
Climate Neutral Certified combines those two things in a verified seal of approval indicating that a product comes from a company taking responsibility for the carbon emissions of its entire supply chain. The idea, according to CEO Austin Whitman, is to make those headache-inducing decisions a little easier — and provide clear, simple actions for folks who want to tread more lightly on the planet.
The nonprofit wants to do for a whole array of products what Fair Trade has done for coffee and LEED has done for buildings — hold manufacturers to higher standards, and give consumers some assurance that the item they’re choosing is as climate-friendly as possible. Almost 70 percent of shoppers in the U.S. and Canada say they look for sustainability in the brands they buy. It’s a particularly high priority for Gen Z and millennial consumers. And although there’s some debate about whether these values actually translate into purchases, “eco-friendly” products are definitely a growing market, and more and more companies are catching on.
Climate Neutral cofounder Peter Dering had heard a lot of talk about reducing carbon footprints among his peers in the outdoors industry. But most of them, himself included, had no idea where to start — or even what their carbon footprints actually were. In 2017, he decided to try measuring it for his company Peak Design, which makes backpacks and other travel gear and accessories. He hired consultants to map every part of every item to every factory, determine the energy consumption of those factories, and figure out what portion of that was devoted to manufacturing stuff for Peak Design. As the process dragged on and the consulting fees racked up, Dering discovered an irony: The cost of measuring his company’s carbon footprint nearly outstripped the cost of offsetting it. “I could put all my dollars toward carbon mitigation,” he says. “Or I could put an equivalent number of dollars toward simply knowing with better confidence what my carbon footprint is.”
He wanted to do the former — and he thought he could get other business leaders on board. Dering joined forces with Jonathan Cedar of BioLite, who had had a similar experience trying to assess his company’s carbon impact. Together, they founded Climate Neutral as a way to help other businesses measure, offset, and reduce their emissions.
To earn the sunburst-y certification each year, a company must estimate its overall carbon footprint using Climate Neutral’s nifty Brand Emissions Estimator — which is less precise, but much quicker and cheaper than hiring a consulting firm. Next, the company must purchase offsets to mitigate its entire carbon output from the preceding year. Finally, it must commit to reducing its emissions and document quantitative progress in doing so.
For the uninitiated: Carbon offsets essentially mean paying someone else to clean up your CO₂ mess by planting trees, erecting wind turbines, or taking other steps to sequester or eliminate greenhouse gases to compensate for what you’ve produced. Not everyone is convinced they’re legit. Critics consider them little more than corporate greenwashing that lets wealthy polluters continue their dirty ways. Dering and Whitman concede offsets are not the answer to the climate crisis, but they are pragmatic enough to understand that there’s only so much companies can do to clean up their supply chains while waiting for the wholesale adoption of clean energy. Offsets allow them to take some responsibility for their climate impacts while continuing to do business. “Austerity will not win this battle,” Dering says.
Climate Neutral’s first crop of 150 brands, which includes the likes of Klean Kanteen, Allbirds, Numi Tea, and Kickstarter, measured and offset 228,314 metric tons of carbon for 2019. The number of brands will grow to 300 this summer, and Whitman aims to get another 250 on board by the end of the year.
Climate Neutral Certified
Given its relatively small advertising budget, the nonprofit largely relies on certified companies to build recognition. “We focus on enabling brands to tell our story clearly, cleanly, and accurately,” says Whitman, “so that when they carry our label out into the market, consumers are able to figure out what it means and trust it.” This is crucial, since part of the value that Climate Neutral offers to companies is the ability to convey their climate-conscious ways to customers in an enticing way. Although most of the feedback is anecdotal at this point, Whitman says he’s seen encouraging comments from shoppers who’ve taken to social media to report choosing Climate Neutral Certified products over others.
Of course, Climate Neutral is far from the only sustainability label out there. The field’s gotten so crowded that you need a database (literally) to keep track of them all. “It can get overwhelming,” says Katherine White, professor of marketing and behavioral science at the University of British Columbia. To stand out, a label must offer something unique and be easy to interpret. Even then, it’s debatable how much sustainability claims influence consumer behavior, even when people say they value it. All else being equal, White says, customers will choose the more sustainable option. But climate-friendly products have a reputation for being expensive. Understandably, it’s tough to get the average shopper to compromise on price — especially when competitors aren’t exactly advertising the grim realities behind their bargain deals. “Take cage-free eggs,” White says. “The alternatives don’t say ‘caged-in-very-uncomfortable-and-unpleasant-circumstances eggs,’ right?” If they did, probably a lot more people would shell out $4.99 for cage-free eggs.
With any eco or social-good certification, the companies most likely to pursue them are the ones already making sustainability a part of their brand. Still, White says, a third-party seal of approval — like Climate Neutral, which requires clear, tangible actions — can help show that a company is serious. “They’re not just putting it in their mission statement,” White says. “They’re putting their money and effort where their mouth is, and being held accountable for what they’re doing.” That will certainly appeal, first and foremost, to the dedicated green consumer.
To reach more people and displace more carbon, Climate Neutral will continue to pursue ever-larger and more prominent brands. Whitman hopes to certify several thousand companies over the next five years, creating a framework for discipline and accountability in the private sector while building trust and understanding with consumers. With that number of companies offsetting their emissions, Whitman says, “We’ll get up into the tens of millions of metric tons of carbon, which starts to feel like meaningful impact.” And a decade from now? Like many in the do-gooder economy, Whitman is ultimately trying to work himself out of a job. “I hope that we don’t have to exist in 10 years,” he says, “because the world will be so convincingly on track to net zero that we won’t have to put this Band-Aid on.”
Now that we’ve had a couple weeks to process all that went wrong in Texas, people are paying more attention to the national electricity landscape, how it functions, and who’s in charge. And with Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress in power, there is a real possibility of establishing long-lasting legislative climate and energy policy. But as someone who has spent the last several years researching how climate legislation gets designed in blue states where governors are among its biggest proponents and Democratic legislative majorities are much wider than they are in D.C., I have three words of warning: investor-owned utilities.
Thanks to an early-20th-century deal between private utility executives (most infamously, Samuel Insull) and state legislators, utility companies hold enormous structural power over policymaking — they are allowed to operate as private monopolies providing a public service. That means climate-policy advocates essentially have two options: Win them over, or reduce their power.
Nationwide, 72 percent of us receive electricity from these corporations. We cannot shop around: With electricity, there’s only one game in town. If you live in Detroit, it’s DTE. In San Francisco, it’s Pacific Gas & Electric. In New York City, it’s Con Edison. There are more than 160 of these companies across the U.S., but most are owned by a handful of larger “holding companies,” such as Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Exelon, Duke, Southern Company, and American Electric Power. Together, these five own more than 30 utilities in 31 states; in 2019, according to Fortune, they earned combined revenues in excess of $347 billion and held combined assets worth more than $1.1 trillion.
Research increasingly shows how effective investor-owned utilities, or IOUs as they’re often called (fitting, perhaps, given how they’ve used our money to finance their remarkable growth), have been getting what they want, primarily through lobbying, making enormous campaign contributions, and controlling access to the data that state regulatory commissions rely on to approve rates. It’s a perfect example of what watchdogs call “regulatory capture.” A recent ProPublica investigation illuminated some of their sneaky tactics, like saddling electricity customers — you and me — with extra costs to increase profits.
Don’t be fooled by the fact that some IOUs set lofty, voluntary climate goals; they often demonstrate little to no intention of meeting them. They enjoy an unmatched track record getting climate and renewable energy policies designed to benefit them financially, sometimes at the expense of any effectiveness in reducing greenhouse gas emissions or promoting renewable energy.
The good news is that about one-third of states have adopted policies that take IOUs out of the business of generating energy. These utilities still own the wires and transmission systems that keep the lights on. But give them reliable, renewable electricity at the right price, and they are more than happy to go green. Under the right conditions, IOUs have proven their willingness to go from being the most powerful opponents of climate and renewable energy policy to being among its most forceful cheerleaders.
My research shows that this is exactly what happened in California, widely considered the nation’s leading climate-policy state. IOUs there divested from fossil-fuel generation years ago, then policymakers enabled them to profit through energy-efficiency incentives. The state’s biggest utilities — PG&E, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas and Electric — supported the landmark climate law, AB 32, adopted in 2006. The story in other leading climate-policy states, like Massachusetts and Oregon, is similar: Ambitious climate and renewable energy policies passed with IOUs’ support.
These private utilities are extremely powerful political actors. They largely designed the electricity system as we know it, and they have made it work very well for themselves. Typically, they favor market-based approaches, like cap-and-trade programs, that tend to draw the ire of environmental justice advocates and that some have argued should be abandoned.
But policymakers are not powerless. They can, for example, make rate-structure adjustments that incentivize IOUs to ditch coal and gas plants more quickly and invest in renewables. They could even get more creative by, for example, imposing progressive rates that require the rich to pay more than people struggling to pay their bills. One way or another, these companies will need to recover costs in order to support strong climate policy. Essentially, they are going to want us to bail them out, not unlike the big banks in the financial crisis of 2008.
There is another option: We can push our federal representatives, who are likely just months away from considering major climate and energy legislation, to begin reining in the political power of IOUs so we no longer have to negotiate on their terms. Congress and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission could take back some of the power they delegated to states in the early 1900s, possibly by taking steps to nationalize the grid. Given the deep, structural sources of these companies’ political power, this will not be easy or quick. These massive structural changes will likely require more than a Democratic president and a 50-50 Senate.
Ideally, though, we would not battle these companies on a city-by-city or state-by-state basis. Many of them are larger than state boundaries; no single state has the power to reform them. And returning utilities to public control has been an often fruitless endeavor in cities that have tried, like Chicago and San Diego; likewise for attempts to pass measures to increase transparency and accountability, as in Illinois recently.
Reducing the power of investor-owned utilities will require our federal representatives to become the experts in energy policy that the IOUs currently are. They’ll need help from climate and consumer activists to master these issues. We must become fluent in the technicalities of how the electric grid works, and how state regulators calculate rates and make determinations about cost recovery. We need to rethink not only our climate policies, but the political economy of energy provision.
IOUs will not be silent bystanders to the legislative work that lies ahead; they will be right in the middle of it. We need to make sure they aren’t the smartest people in the room.
The views expressed here reflect those of the author. Fix is committed to publishing a diversity of voices. Got a bold idea or fresh news analysis? Submit your op-ed draft, along with a note about who you are, tofix@grist.org.
Joshua A. Basseches is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the politics of state-level climate and renewable energy policy design. Previously, he worked in the Massachusetts state legislature.
Now that we’ve had a couple weeks to process all that went wrong in Texas, people are paying more attention to the national electricity landscape, how it functions, and who’s in charge. And with Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress in power, there is a real possibility of establishing long-lasting legislative climate and energy policy. But as someone who has spent the last several years researching how climate legislation gets designed in blue states where governors are among its biggest proponents and Democratic legislative majorities are much wider than they are in D.C., I have three words of warning: investor-owned utilities.
Thanks to an early-20th-century deal between private utility executives (most infamously, Samuel Insull) and state legislators, utility companies hold enormous structural power over policymaking — they are allowed to operate as private monopolies providing a public service. That means climate-policy advocates essentially have two options: Win them over, or reduce their power.
Nationwide, 72 percent of us receive electricity from these corporations. We cannot shop around: With electricity, there’s only one game in town. If you live in Detroit, it’s DTE. In San Francisco, it’s Pacific Gas & Electric. In New York City, it’s Con Edison. There are more than 160 of these companies across the U.S., but most are owned by a handful of larger “holding companies,” such as Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Exelon, Duke, Southern Company, and American Electric Power. Together, these five own more than 30 utilities in 31 states; in 2019, according to Fortune, they earned combined revenues in excess of $347 billion and held combined assets worth more than $1.1 trillion.
Research increasingly shows how effective investor-owned utilities, or IOUs as they’re often called (fitting, perhaps, given how they’ve used our money to finance their remarkable growth), have been getting what they want, primarily through lobbying, making enormous campaign contributions, and controlling access to the data that state regulatory commissions rely on to approve rates. It’s a perfect example of what watchdogs call “regulatory capture.” A recent ProPublica investigation illuminated some of their sneaky tactics, like saddling electricity customers — you and me — with extra costs to increase profits.
Don’t be fooled by the fact that some IOUs set lofty, voluntary climate goals; they often demonstrate little to no intention of meeting them. They enjoy an unmatched track record getting climate and renewable energy policies designed to benefit them financially, sometimes at the expense of any effectiveness in reducing greenhouse gas emissions or promoting renewable energy.
The good news is that about one-third of states have adopted policies that take IOUs out of the business of generating energy. These utilities still own the wires and transmission systems that keep the lights on. But give them reliable, renewable electricity at the right price, and they are more than happy to go green. Under the right conditions, IOUs have proven their willingness to go from being the most powerful opponents of climate and renewable energy policy to being among its most forceful cheerleaders.
My research shows that this is exactly what happened in California, widely considered the nation’s leading climate-policy state. IOUs there divested from fossil-fuel generation years ago, then policymakers enabled them to profit through energy-efficiency incentives. The state’s biggest utilities — PG&E, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas and Electric — supported the landmark climate law, AB 32, adopted in 2006. The story in other leading climate-policy states, like Massachusetts and Oregon, is similar: Ambitious climate and renewable energy policies passed with IOUs’ support.
These private utilities are extremely powerful political actors. They largely designed the electricity system as we know it, and they have made it work very well for themselves. Typically, they favor market-based approaches, like cap-and-trade programs, that tend to draw the ire of environmental justice advocates and that some have argued should be abandoned.
But policymakers are not powerless. They can, for example, make rate-structure adjustments that incentivize IOUs to ditch coal and gas plants more quickly and invest in renewables. They could even get more creative by, for example, imposing progressive rates that require the rich to pay more than people struggling to pay their bills. One way or another, these companies will need to recover costs in order to support strong climate policy. Essentially, they are going to want us to bail them out, not unlike the big banks in the financial crisis of 2008.
There is another option: We can push our federal representatives, who are likely just months away from considering major climate and energy legislation, to begin reining in the political power of IOUs so we no longer have to negotiate on their terms. Congress and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission could take back some of the power they delegated to states in the early 1900s, possibly by taking steps to nationalize the grid. Given the deep, structural sources of these companies’ political power, this will not be easy or quick. These massive structural changes will likely require more than a Democratic president and a 50-50 Senate.
Ideally, though, we would not battle these companies on a city-by-city or state-by-state basis. Many of them are larger than state boundaries; no single state has the power to reform them. And returning utilities to public control has been an often fruitless endeavor in cities that have tried, like Chicago and San Diego; likewise for attempts to pass measures to increase transparency and accountability, as in Illinoisrecently.
Reducing the power of investor-owned utilities will require our federal representatives to become the experts in energy policy that the IOUs currently are. They’ll need help from climate and consumer activists to master these issues. We must become fluent in the technicalities of how the electric grid works, and how state regulators calculate rates and make determinations about cost recovery. We need to rethink not only our climate policies, but the political economy of energy provision.
IOUs will not be silent bystanders to the legislative work that lies ahead; they will be right in the middle of it. We need to make sure they aren’t the smartest people in the room.
The views expressed here reflect those of the author. Fix is committed to publishing a diversity of voices. Got a bold idea or fresh news analysis? Submit your op-ed draft, along with a note about who you are, tofix@grist.org.
Black Americans played essential, if largely unsung, roles in the creation of our National Park System. Buffalo Soldiers — six Black regiments that served primarily out West after the Civil War — were among the first rangers, with some 500 serving in Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks. A generation later, many of the 200,000 African Americans in the segregated Civilian Conservation Corps worked through the Depression building much of the public-lands infrastructure that still stands today.
Each of them helped make some of the country’s wildest, most beautiful places accessible to all — a role Charles Young took to heart as the first Black superintendent of federal parkland. During his brief tenure in 1903 managing Sequoia National Park and what later became Kings Canyon National Park, Young achieved more in one summer than most of us hope to in a year. He supervised construction of the first publicly accessible roads leading to the highest peak in the Lower 48 and to two of the greatwonders of the Sierra Nevada, effectively introducing tourism to national parks. Young also negotiated deals to extend the parks’ borders, and urged the Secretary of the Interior to expand them further — a recommendation Congress acted on. Today, advocates of greater representation and equal access to outdoor spaces are building on the achievements of a man who began that campaign more than 100 years ago.
His legacy is “a reminder of excellence and history, and the idea that discrimination and systems of oppression can’t hold back change,” says Grist 50 Fixer CJ Goulding, a program manager at the Children & Nature Network, and partner at The Avarna Group. “For me, that’s what Charles Young signifies.”
Young — known for his strong leadership style, work ethic, and lifelong intellectual pursuits — has been lauded as a diplomat, an academic, and a military leader by such presidents as Theodore Roosevelt and Barack Obama. He was born in May’s Lick, Kentucky, to enslaved parents in 1864 — the year before the end of the Civil War. In 1866, the family moved to the abolitionist hub of Ripley, Ohio, where Young, gifted in music and foreign languages, graduated from high school with honors.
His father encouraged him to enroll at West Point, where he became the third African American student to graduate in 1889. Soon after, the Army sent him west to serve with the Buffalo Soldiers of the Ninth U.S. Cavalry Regiment, where he was a natural soldier who rose to the rank of captain, served with distinction in the Philippine-American War, and became the leading military-science professor at Wilberforce College in Wilberforce, Ohio. Though his work took him to far-flung places, Young made Ohio his home. His house, nicknamed “Youngsholm,” became a gathering place for prominent Black intellectuals and leaders, including lifelong friends W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Laurence Dunbar.
In 1903, a few years after Congress began allocating money to increase access to the parks, Young was appointed the superintendent of Sequoia and the adjacent General Grant (now Kings Canyon) National Parks by the Army, which oversaw the system. Still leading the Ninth Cavalry, Young deployed 15 soldiers to construct the first trail to the summit of Mount Whitney (elevation:14,505 feet). He supervised construction of roads that led to an immense sequoia grove, called Giant Forest, and to Moro Rock, the iconic dome-shaped granite formation at the center of the park. Young also played key roles in expanding the size of the two parks, which sit about 200 miles north of Los Angeles.
Delighted with his work, residents of a nearby town suggested naming a sequoia in Young’s honor. Ever humble, he asked that they revisit the idea in 20 years and suggested they consider Booker T. Washington instead. In the end, both men received the honor; today, the two trees stand alongside one of the very roads Young’s men built. Given that the tree bearing his name may live for thousands of years, it seems a fitting tribute to his contributions. “He had to face a lot of adversity and discrimination in order to create the change that he did,” says Goulding. “When he and the Buffalo Soldiers went out there to do that work, he didn’t just wither, he wasn’t just mediocre, he wasn’t just decent — he and his men excelled.”
The Army tended to rotate people through park service assignments after just a few months, and Young soon moved on. The rest of his career was no less illustrious than his tenure in the mountains of Southern California. He served as the nation’s first Black military attaché during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration and was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1916. When the U.S. entered World War I, Young was slated for a promotion to brigadier general, only to see it scuttled when white officers protested. Instead, he was pushed into medical retirement in 1917.
Even that couldn’t stop him, though. Young proved his health by riding 500 miles on horseback from Ohio to Washington, D.C., prompting the Army to reinstate him at the rank of colonel and send him to Liberia as a military attaché. Young died of a kidney infection on January 8, 1922, in Lagos. When his body was repatriated, he received a hero’s welcome. On June 1, 1923, he became the fourth soldier to have a ceremony at the Arlington Memorial Amphitheater and be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Even now, Young continues to inspire those who see the value of public lands and dedicate themselves to ensuring they are open, and welcoming, to all. Goulding, who started his career as a National Park Service intern nearly a decade ago, says he’s always viewed outdoor access through a lens of diversity. Quoting the famous Woody Guthrie song, Goulding acknowledges there’s still a ways to go. “‘This land is your land / this land is my land’ — those sound like nice words, but the system we live in wasn’t created for that to mean everybody.”
Charles Young understood that when he took the first steps toward making our parks just a little bit more accessible for folks more than a century ago.
This is the third in a series of posts honoring the overlooked legacies of Black environmentalists from the past. You can read more here and here.
In December, a British coroner ruled that the cause of 9-year-old Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah’s death in 2013 was “toxic air pollution.” On its face this may not seem all that important, given that an estimated 7 million people die annually from air pollution and more than 90 percent of the world’s population breathes in hazardous air every day. And yet Ella’s certificate of death is the first to formally list toxic air pollution as the cause of death.
Ella’s case is part of a growing recognition that human-produced toxic pollution is causing a substantial global health crisis, and it has substantial implications for environmental policymaking and for the legal liabilities that pollution producers may face in the future.
If the recent cases surrounding glyphosate — the herbicide pioneered by Monsanto in its infamous Roundup weedkiller — are any guide, Ella’s case could trigger a potential windfall of cases. After a California court awarded $289 million in damages to Dewayne Johnson, a groundskeeper who used glyphosate for decades, civil cases mounted by the thousands. As a result, Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, agreed to a $10 billion settlement for all other cases in the U.S..
In the U.K., Ella’s case has already sparked local action. The British government recently stated that in response to the verdict it would allocate $5.2 billion towards cleaning up vehicle transport emissions in cities and reducing urban nitrogen dioxide levels — the pollutant named as partially responsible for Ella’s death in the coroner’s report. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said, “Ministers and the previous mayor have acted too slowly in the past, but they must now learn the lessons from the coroner’s ruling and do much more to tackle the deadly scourge of air pollution in London and across the country.”
Living in London, Ella was like many urban-dwelling children who are more likely to develop asthma or other respiratory illnesses due to early and chronic exposure to air pollution from cars, buses, and industry. The coroner concluded that a complex of different noxious gases and particles in the air she breathed daily caused the asthma attack that led to her death.
While children’s respiratory systems are more vulnerable, adults do not escape the reach of air pollution in cities, where higher rates of dementia and Alzheimer’s are linked to exposure to particulate matter of 2.5 microns or less in size. It’s also one of the strongest correlates of death or hospitalization due to COVID-19. Spikes in particulate matter, along with other air pollutants like nitrogen oxides, are associated with higher death rates in general in the days following exposure.
Here in the United States, there’s been relatively little attention paid to Ella’s case. Given the pandemic, domestic political struggles, and the transition to a new presidential administration, there is certainly an overload of news competing for attention. But with the renewed focus on climate change and environmental justice signaled by the Biden administration and among U.S. policymakers, Ella’s case could be the perfect catalyst for environmental justice, in which poverty, race, and environmental risk exposure intersect. Ella’s case sets a legal precedent to do something about it.
Death certificates fall under the purview of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Thanks to guidance issued by the Obama administration, environmental exposure may be listed as a contributing factor to a death, but there is currently no code to attribute the immediate cause of death to a toxic pollution exposure. The Biden administration could issue guidance to the CDC to change that, which could shift the way people think about pollution.
There are more than 450,000 toxic sites across the U.S. and more than 20,000 active permitted polluters. We need to amend and bolster current domestic environmental legislation to hold polluters accountable and to make the changes permanent, rather than executive orders and programs that can be rolled back by a future administration.
Biden’s order to build a White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy and an environmental justice interagency council is a formidable start to mitigating and remediating toxic pollution and its unequal distribution. Additionally, the Biden administration needs to put toxic air pollution on the international environmental agenda, for example leading the charge in creating a corollary international agreement to the Paris Climate Agreement.
Doing so would signal a shift from treating the outcomes of climate change to treating the causes. For example, in early 2016, the Department of Housing and Urban Development deemed the Isle de Jean Charles along the Louisiana Gulf Coast too risky to live on and granted $48 million to the community to relocate, for the first time codifying the term “climate refugee.” But what could have been the start to a long process of redistributive environmental justice to communities threatened by climate change was quickly doused by the incoming Trump team.
In that case and in the case of glyphosate, it is the outcomes of pollution that were addressed — either by restitution or relocation — rather than the root cause.
Ella’s tragic death puts a face to a problem that will be responsible for many more deaths in the future if we don’t change our current policies. Let’s not let this opportunity for systemic change pass us by.
Domingo Morales will be the first to tell you that composting changed his life.
It all started in 2015 when the Brooklyn resident spotted a flier for Green City Force — an AmeriCorps sustainability training program aimed at youth within the New York City Housing Authority. Morales fit the description of an ideal applicant to a T and, feeling aimless after quitting his restaurant job months before, thought it might be a sign.
Today, Morales manages composting sites and teaches people how to incorporate composting into their lives. For some, that means bringing a crank composting system into their apartment. For others, it’s setting up a vermicomposting system (which is all about the worms, for you non-experts!) in a classroom. In a city where one-third of garbage is compostable, there’s a woeful shortage of composting services — especially for the one in 15 people who live in public housing. Morales sees grassroots composting, especially among Housing Authority residents, as a way of bridging that gap while fostering empowerment and inclusivity within the green economy. To that end, Morales mentors the next generation with the goal of increasing diversity within the composting community.
Morales found his own mentor several years ago in David Buckel, a prominent LGBT lawyer and environmental activist. Seven months after joining Green City Force, Morales landed a job at the Red Hook Farms compost site in Brooklyn, where he and Buckel worked together for three years. When Buckel self-immolated to protest fossil fuels in 2018, Morales dedicated himself to carrying on his legacy by managing the compost site with help from a volunteer.
After losing that job when the Red Hook Farms compost site lost funding early in the pandemic, Morales applied for the David Prize — a new award for NYC residents with big ideas — to develop his Compost Power education initiative. He received the $200,000 grant in October and started building and renovating 10 compost sites, often alongside Green City Force, with the capacity to handle 50 tons by the end of 2021. (He’s already halfway toward that goal.) Morales hopes to see communities take over running these sites, but if they lack the resources, he’ll train folks to do the job and help find the money to keep them going.
As if that’s not enough to keep him busy, Morales also wants to launch an educational show on composting within the next year or two. In the meantime, you’ll find him at compost sites throughout NYC and on the Compost Power Instagram, where he shares updates and composting explainers.
Fix chatted with Morales about grassroots composting, and what tips he has for compost experts looking to start local initiatives. His remarks have been edited for length and clarity.
On composting as a communal act
To me, composting is the easiest way to be sustainable. If you drop off food scraps at a compost site, you can actually see them turn into the finished product used to grow more food. Every other form of recycling, you have to follow it from transfer station to transfer station to transfer station. I want to see the whole process, and I want to create that resource myself. That’s why I chose composting.
I plan to train and hire young adults with Green City Force, place them in green jobs, and create something like a workers’ cooperative where they can be owners in the future. By providing infrastructure and education to underserved communities, we can give them the power to take over those systems and create their own economic sustainability by generating programs that can harbor jobs and careers.
That’s basically what Compost Power is about. I chose “Compost Power” as the name because I’m using compost to bring power back to the community.
On compost systems that best meet community needs
If a community wants a specific system, I’m absolutely gonna make it happen for them. It isn’t about what I want or what I think the best system for that space would be. It’s working with people to figure out what they want. As long as we’re composting, I feel like it works.
As I’m building these sites, I’m creating videos so the public can see how it’s done: What issues come with building a site? How do you compost? How do you separate organics in your household? I’m always considering these things as I build sites, asking, “What can any New Yorker benefit from?”
Morales works with youth from the Green City Force to construct composting systems near public housing, like this one at Brooklyn’s Bay View Houses complex.Domingo Morales
On building large-scale support around sustainability initiatives
It’s important to educate the community about the benefits of composting before you start talking about launching a program. Just having a space where people can learn about different forms of sustainability is how we get engagement from the residents. That’s when they say, “Hey, can we build a farm? Can we build a compost site?”
The key to making it easy is to ask for input from residents, get them involved. Once you’re organized, you can start talking to the city council and see if your city offers participatory budgeting.
Once you have the power of the community behind you, you can build anything. As long as the people are behind me, I haven’t had an issue building a site. You just have to show them that that power is there — that they have that power.
On the importance of grassroots compositing initiatives
Before COVID, the Department of Sanitation was basically the sole funder for composting in New York City, with the exception of BK Rot and a couple of other grassroots organizations. When the department lost funding, all of those sites lost funding as well. Composting in New York was almost completely halted.
My idea is to build compost sites that aren’t contingent upon city funding. I’m using the grant to do this for neighborhoods that otherwise can’t afford their own composting systems. I’m giving them a free composting system so that if the city cuts funding, we have a diverse network of community compost sites that can hold that extra weight.
On convincing people that composting is cool
The first thing you have to do is remove the myths. A lot of people think that compost smells like trash, that it brings rats, that it’s disgusting. You have to prove to them that isn’t true if you do composting the right way. We haven’t had a rat problem at our Red Hook compost site, and we’ve been here since 2011. We haven’t had any odors. Walk down that block, and you wouldn’t even know it’s a compost site.
Once that compost is steaming and there are worms, you start to get interest from people. They ask, “Hey, did you light that on fire?” and “Why is that hot?” That “nature” part of composting really intrigues the community. The kids love playing with the worms. The adults are mesmerized by the steam. That’s the key — expose people to composting and give them a taste of it. That right there would just make it seem so cool.
For underserved youth to see somebody like me teaching them about composting and telling them, “Yeah, you know, I worked at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for five years, and I started my own company” — that really piques their interest. They see there is potential to make something out of this. Telling people my story helps me sell it.
For justice to be truly served in U.S. courts, however, policymakers and communities trying to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable must do everything in their power to secure justice and restitution for those most impacted around the globe. A critical first step is teaming up and aligning strategies to end the legal loopholes corporations use to escape liability.
To achieve this, a global coalition of liability experts, social justice activists, and NGOs — including one of ours, Corporate Accountability — teamed up to create a tool for governments and civil society movements. Called the Liability Roadmap, it pulls together the expertise of Indigenous and frontline communities that are fighting the worst polluters and setting global legal precedents. A key element for success is collaboration.
While U.S.-based fossil fuel corporations have run roughshod over human rights, democracy, and the environment around the world in pursuit of profit, frontline communities have been waging legal battles for decades. They’ve won many favorable rulings. For example, in 2019, a Dutch court ruled in favor of four Nigerian women in a decades-long suit against Royal Dutch Shell for its complicity in the 1995 deaths of their husbands, allowing the suit to proceed. In Chad in 2016, a court fined Exxon $74 billion in back taxes and royalties. And in Ecuador, Indigenous communities won a judgment ordering Chevron to pay $9.5 billion for the corporation’s extraction, damages, and pollution in the Amazon.
Yet in many of these cases, the defendants have yet to pay a dime. In Ecuador, for example, Chevron countersued the country, leveraging a bilateral investment treaty to avoid paying. In isolation, these cases face long odds against the financial, legal, and political might of Big Polluters, which threaten endless counter-litigation and legal intimidation to escape accountability. Land and environmental defenders are also at high risk of violence. According to Global Witness, 2019 was the deadliest year on record. In Colombia and elsewhere, fossil fuel, mining, and agribusiness corporations have been accused of complicity.
To succeed against these odds, litigants and civil society must join together to share resources and strategy, just as the world did against another deadly industry, tobacco. One of the inspirations for the Liability Roadmap is found in a little-known public health treaty of the World Health Organization called the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Among other critical measures, it details how governments could recoup immense tobacco-related health care costs. Included in the framework is a civil liability toolkit to help countries use their laws and international agreements to the greatest effect, along with suggestions for changing laws and pursuing precedents that prevent corporations from exploiting trade agreements to avoid liability.
Collaboration can take a multitude of forms. In many cases, it’s as simple as sharing intelligence on industry operations and legal strategy. But it can also mean international collaboration between countries. Legal cases seek justice in the form of criminal and civil liability for abuses, but their purpose is often broader: ending the fossil fuel industry’s long record of political manipulation. The first step for those taking on Big Polluters in the U.S. is to reach out to those around the globe who have been doing the same.
The success of U.S.-based fossil fuel corporations like Chevron has depended upon the exploitation and abuse of resources and people in the Global South. So it is also imperative legal victories benefit those communities that have endured the greatest impacts of corporate abuse. Justice in the U.S. must be restorative beyond its borders.
There’s a growing call for such equity at negotiating meetings of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the global climate treaty that the Paris Agreement is part of. Climate-justice and environmental groups are calling for governments negotiating the implementation of the treaty to establish a fund that would support nations hit hard by climate impacts. As part of that process, governments could require that wealthy nations allocate a percentage of fossil fuel litigation proceeds to such a fund. This would be groundbreaking and provide a path toward repairing the deliberate harm caused by polluting corporations.
We know going it alone doesn’t work. It’s time to work together to catalyze a just and equitable transition from fossil fuels. It’s time to make Big Polluters pay.
The views expressed here reflect those of the authors. Fix is committed to publishing a diversity of voices. Got a bold idea or fresh news analysis? Submit your op-ed draft, along with a note about who you are, to fix@grist.org.
The fact you don’t hear MaVynee Oshun Betsch mentioned alongside conservationists like John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and perhaps Rachel Carson says more about who we enshrine in history books than Betsch’s remarkable contributions to the environmental movement and her valiant campaign to save a landmark of Black history.
Betsch was born in 1935 to wealth, and embarked on an international career as an opera singer before returning to her Florida hometown and donating most of her fortune to a long list of environmental causes. But even that pales alongside her dedication to preserving American Beach, a dune-dappled stretch of sand 40 miles northwest of Jacksonville that was among the most popular vacation spots for African Americans during the Jim Crow era.
American Beach is not unique in serving those who were barred by law or by custom from recreation opportunities others took for granted. Black beach communities sprang up in coastal areas nationwide during the first half of the 20th century, with notable examples in Sag Harbor on Long Island and Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard. Yet despite the fact such places are significant to Black history, there’s been little effort to preserve them.
“Virginia Key Beach [in Miami] was the beach for Black people,” says Zelalem Adefris, a 2020 Grist Fixer and vice president of policy and advocacy at climate justice org Catalyst Miami. “Today, there’s a big garbage dump there, which just goes to show how these places can be treated and why the conservation of something really beautiful is so important.”
Betsch had deeply personal reasons for defending American Beach against developers and others who considered it a place to be exploited, not preserved. Her great-grandfather, Abraham Lincoln Lewis, was instrumental in its founding in 1935. He also cofounded the Afro-American Insurance Company, an endeavor that made him Florida’s first Black millionaire. Lewis created the beachside community as a resort spot for his employees and other Black families who were not welcome elsewhere. Celebrities like Duke Ellington, Ray Charles, Joe Louis, and Zora Neale Hurston joined countless others in crossing the segregated South each summer to relax along the shore.
Betsch, who was born in Jacksonville, spent much of her childhood there before leaving Florida as a teen to train as an opera singer at Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. That led to performances throughout Europe and a promising career. She was singing abroad when Hurricane Dora leveled much of American Beach in 1964, which, ironically, was in an economic slide that started with the decline of segregation and the rise of the civil rights movement. “The whole economic skeleton of the black community, so painfully erected in the face of exclusion and injustice, collapsed as that exclusion was rescinded,” the journalist Russ Rymer, who befriended Betsch, wrote in American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory.
Despite the glamour of her budding career, something called Betsch back to the beach. “It was like something in my brain just went …” she told Sierra magazine in 2005, snapping her fingers for effect. “There were herons. The ducks would come in November. I read every book about birds I could find. I went berserk.” Beyond the birds, Betsch grew obsessed with preserving Nana, the tallest dune on Florida’s east coast. By the time Betsch returned to Jacksonville in the 1960s, American Beach was showing its age, its permanent population dwindling and its once-busting nightclubs and restaurants boarded up.
In 1975, Betsch moved into her grandfather’s beach house and started her second career as an activist and preservationist. She allocated her entire inheritance and all of her income to preserving American Beach, donating liberally to organizations like the Xerces Society, which underwrote creation of the Red Data Book for invertebrates — the most comprehensive accounting of threatened invertebrate species to date. She became a lifetime member of 10 environmental organizations and at one point belonged to more than 50, according to Sierra.
Betsch eventually sold the family home and took to sleeping in a chair on the beach. She became known as the Beach Lady. She wore her hair in an enormous lock that stretched to her ankle and sported 18-inch nails on the fingers of her left hand. She also added an “E” and dropped the “R” in her birth name of Marvyne to protest the Reagan Administration’s environmental policies. Given that she was 6 feet tall and bedecked in shells and stones from the sea, Betsch cut quite a figure.
Some may have thought her odd, even eccentric, but no one underestimated her dedication to preserving American Beach. When developers came knocking in the 1990s with plans for an exclusive community, Betsch redoubled her efforts. She was largely successful, too: The National Park Service added American Beach to its National Register of Historic Places in 2002. One of her pet projects, a museum preserving the legacy of American Beach, opened in 2014.
Betsch died of cancer in 2005 and has largely faded from history. That is so often the case among those who dedicate themselves to helping others, but it in no way diminishes her contributions.
“I think a lot of people go unnoticed for their amazing work in preservation and social justice, especially Black activists,” Adefris says. “But their impact speaks to what people, when they follow their passions, contribute to the movement to support their communities and their neighborhoods.”
This is the second in a series of posts honoring the overlooked legacies of Black environmentalists from the past. You can read more here.
Long before burgers were Impossible and fish had no fins, there was the lowly carob seed.
In the 1970s, the burgeoning natural-foods movement embraced carob as a “healthy” alternative to chocolate. The chalky, cloying substance went on to rob countless children of their childhoods. It eventually fell out of favor, mostly because it was universally loathed, but there’s a lesson here for anyone trying to create delicious ersatz products: It must approach the taste and texture of the original.
Most players in today’s alt-protein sector have internalized this point. Plant-based burgers and sausages are highly evolved replacements capable of fooling even the most discerning palates, and the number of entrants in the market grows daily. But seafood has lagged behind faux beef and chicken for a few reasons. For one, it is already considered a healthy alternative to meat, especially fish like salmon and tuna that are high in omega-3 fatty acids. “DHA omega-3 is important for our brain, eye, and heart health,” says nutritionist Frances Largeman-Roth. “Most of us, especially vegans, are really challenged to get what they need.” What’s more, replicating something like a tuna steak or sushi-grade salmon is considerably harder than a ground meat analogue like a burger or sausage.
Yet the environmental stakes are just as high when it comes to seafood. While our love for red meat is devastating the planet and exacerbating climate change, overfishing and destructive techniques like trawling have destabilized ocean ecosystems. Over 90 percent of wild fisheries are considered overfished or at maximum capacity. Shrimp is by far the most popular seafood in the U.S., and mangrove forests, which absorb carbon dioxide and help protect coastlines, are being cleared to make way for massive shrimp farms.
I’ve flirted with the idea of veganism, having recently written a few articles on the subject of alt-meats and interviewed the cofounders of a seaweed protein start-up as well as a vegan astrophysicist-turned-food scientist. I’m also intrigued by some newcomers to the marketplace — plant-based crab cakes! Vegan shrimp! Fishless fillets! Even a bluefin(less) tuna! — produced by tech companies attracting VC support and consumers seeking more responsible culinary choices.
But enough about all this. Are these products any good? Would it be possible to feed my family these meat-free seafood analogues for an entire week? Could I expiate guilt while shoring up our Omega-3s? I decided to give it a shot.
Monday: Vegan Shrimp Scampi
My experiment with plant-based seafood began at Orchard Grocer, a vegan grocery and sandwich shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The neighborhood is steeped in immigrant history and no small amount of irony: Old-school delis peddling smoked fish and kosher meats have been edged out by hip vegan restaurants. These hotspots peddle similar fare, but instead of standard dishes prepared from animal flesh, everything is made with plant proteins and mysterious ingredients like konjac and algal oil.
With this in mind, I decided to pick up a couple of alt-meat sandwiches to see if the Poppy (chickpea “tuna” salad with the works, on marble rye) or the Marlowe (a Reuben made with beet-brined Blackbird seitan and Violife provolone) could pass for the real thing. As I would discover later, these items taken out of the box or pouch might’ve given me pause, but when prepared by an expert they were surprisingly good. My carnivorous husband went so far as to call the Marlowe delicious with the texture of corned beef, and my Poppy was surprisingly tunalike, with a faint umami flavor complemented by a nice, chewy texture. I ordered a side of carrot lox as well, and after my initial reaction — it’s just carrot! It’s bullshit! — a pleasant smokiness lingered.
I was excited to kick off faux seafood week with vegan shrimp, because not only is the crustacean my 6-year-old’s all-time favorite food, my husband is allergic to it. It also is among the most ethically dubious things you can eat in terms of environmental destruction and human rights abuses.
Scampi is easy and usually a crowd-pleaser, so I set a pot of water to boil for the pasta and opened a package of vegan shrimp. These facsimiles, made with modified starch, pea protein, and glucomannan (a dietary fiber derived from the konjac root), had an oddly rough texture and resembled nothing so much as a baker’s dozen of severed fingers.
Uncooked shrimp are dull gray in color — only when heated do they perk up and turn pink, curling as they cook. These vegan shrimp came pink and stayed pink. They’re also curled straight out of the bag. Without these visual cues, I had no idea how long to cook them. I sautéed them for a few minutes, adding ample amounts of garlic and lemon. I found them edible and somewhat shrimpy in flavor, but their gummy worm-like texture, which slowly calcified through dinner, had an unsettling uniformity to it.
Adrienne Day
Texture is critical when creating plant-based seafoods and the hardest thing to get right, says food biotechnologist Sonia Hurtado, cofounder and chief science officer at Kuleana, which has a bluefin tuna analogue in the pipeline. “If you want to do a cooked fish like cod, you can do it with current processing technologies, but you can’t do that when you want to mimic raw flesh” for something like tuna or salmon sashimi.
Hurtado wouldn’t tell me how Kuleana approximates the texture of raw fish beyond saying “enzymes and algae” play into it, but she says it works. “When we did blind taste tests, people thought our product was real bluefin tuna,” she says. Kuleana, which recently raised $3 million in VC funding, plans on launching their product this year, starting with restaurants and then moving into retail stores.
Tuesday: Fish and Chips
While plant-based nigiri might turn off sushi fans, there is a growing appetite for faux fish. That might explain why Gardein’s fishless filets are seemingly ubiquitous, at least in Brooklyn — even my local deli carries them. “It’s the biggest seller in the U.S. by far,” says Jennifer Lamy, senior manager of the sustainable seafood initiative at the Good Food Institute. Granted that has more to do with the lack of competition than anything else. But that, too, is changing: Sophie’s Kitchen recently struck a deal with Walmart to carry its faux crab cakes and scallops. Even a giant brand like Nestlé is casting its line, test-marketing its fish-free Vuna in Switzerland.
The goal of the alt-meat sector is to reach a flexitarian audience — the vegan-curious, if you will — and convince people that their products excel on moral, environmental, and health grounds, and can compete, cheek by jowl, with equally delicious animal proteins. “You can’t overstate how important it is that these products taste good,” Lamy says.
Monica Talbert knows how critical that is. In 2013, she and her sister teamed up with their mother to found Van Cleve Seafood, which developed the Chesapeake blue crab pie endorsed by the likes of Oprah. But Talbert saw firsthand the human and environmental cost of the seafood industry, and in May 2020 she founded The Plant Based Seafood Co. One of its first products was a faux crab cake so authentic that people called it the best crab cake they’ve ever had, she says. Her phone started ringing with queries from around the world. “It was then that I saw the potential opportunity and the potential impact of plant-based seafood,” says Talbert.
Baked and served with french fries and a dollop of ketchup, Gardein’s filets made for a more than passable fish-and-chips dinner. It tasted much like your standard fish fillet, though the Gardein “fish” filling had a spongy rather than flaky quality. That didn’t stop us from quickly polishing it off, though.
Wednesday: Vegan Smoked Lox and Cavi-art
The idea of caviar without the fish eggs becomes much more palatable when you check the price of the real stuff. A 100-gram jar of Russ & Daughters’ Osetra Gueldenstaedtii caviar will set you back about $500. The same amount will buy 72 jars of Cavi-art, available in both black (the “fancy” stuff) and orange roe, the kind you often find in sushi rolls. A purist certainly won’t be satisfied with the fake stuff, but the fact that roe-producing sturgeon are teetering on the brink of extinction might soon leave them with few other options.
I’m hardly a purist, as my experience with caviar is limited, but I found these seaweed-based analogues impressively realistic, with the tensile quality of caviar. They left a pleasing salty-umami aftertaste, though they didn’t burst open and melt in the mouth quite the same way.
I wasn’t sure how to serve them — I was running low on blini and Dom Perignon —so I included them on a bagel platter with Sophie’s Kitchen’s vegan smoked salmon and other fixings. The vegan alternative to brined salmon had a strange rubbery quality and came out of the package soaking wet — I literally had to wring it out over the sink. And the taste didn’t fool anyone. My husband took one bite and gave the rest to the cat, who didn’t seem interested in it, either. It had a decently smoky flavor though, and when I sandwiched it in a bagel with the works, I was able to more or less pretend it was the real deal.
Adrienne Day
Thursday: Fish-Free Tuna Blind Taste Test
So far, I have to say, I was impressed by the vegan seafood I’d tried. That ended with faux tuna. I really wanted to like it, especially since Good Catch seems like a company in it for the right reasons. It also is aiming for something that competes nutritionally with heart-healthy fish. “They do this by adding algal oil to their protein base, which is made from various plant proteins,” Largeman-Roth says. Algal oil, which is derived from certain marine algae, is an excellent source of DHA omega-3. “It also gives the product a ‘from the sea’ flavor, which may or may not be to your liking,” she says.
I cut open a pouch of Good Catch “naked” fish-free tuna and hoo-boy, did I take an instant dislike to it! I can’t tell you if it was the algal oil, the product’s brownish hue, or its musky odor, but neither mayo nor dill nor salt and pepper, lemon, or even sriracha could disguise its flaccid, almost-tuna qualities. A blind taste test with Bumble Bee tuna fooled no one, though my husband proclaimed the fish-free tuna “good,” albeit slightly grittier than tuna — but he also eats tinned sardines (topped with yogurt!) for lunch.
This brings me to another issue facing some of these vegan seafoods: the “uncanny valley” problem. How much should they resemble the real deal? When biting into a steak, you encounter buttery flesh, but also fat, gristle, and bone. Is this what we crave? Is a desire to strip flesh from bone while spitting out gristle somehow encoded in our DNA?
Friday: Good Catch Crabless Cakes
For the final evening of my experiment, I pan-fried Good Catch crabless crab cakes and paired them with homemade remoulade. I served them to friends, who happen to be seafood lovers, in our corona-pod and the cakes were gone within minutes. Everyone agreed they tasted just like crab, but I have to wonder if the other flavors in the mix — the breadcrumb coating, a squeeze of lemon, a dusting of parsley — fooled our brains into thinking we were eating genuine crab, not “a six-plant protein blend.” But with our bellies full, wine glasses low, and appetites satiated, it didn’t seem to matter.
Long before burgers were Impossible and fish had no fins, there was the lowly carob seed.
In the 1970s, the burgeoning natural-foods movement embraced carob as a “healthy” alternative to chocolate. The chalky, cloying substance went on to rob countless children of their childhoods. It eventually fell out of favor, mostly because it was universally loathed, but there’s a lesson here for anyone trying to create delicious ersatz products: It must approach the taste and texture of the original.
Most players in today’s alt-protein sector have internalized this point. Plant-based burgers and sausages are highly evolved replacements capable of fooling even the most discerning palates, and the number of entrants in the market grows daily. But seafood has lagged behind faux beef and chicken for a few reasons. For one, it is already considered a healthy alternative to meat, especially fish like salmon and tuna that are high in omega-3 fatty acids. “DHA omega-3 is important for our brain, eye, and heart health,” says nutritionist Frances Largeman-Roth. “Most of us, especially vegans, are really challenged to get what they need.” What’s more, replicating something like a tuna steak or sushi-grade salmon is considerably harder than a ground meat analogue like a burger or sausage.
Yet the environmental stakes are just as high when it comes to seafood. While our love for red meat is devastating the planet and exacerbating climate change, overfishing and destructive techniques like trawling have destabilized ocean ecosystems. Over 90 percent of wild fisheries are considered overfished or at maximum capacity. Shrimp is by far the most popular seafood in the U.S., and mangrove forests, which absorb carbon dioxide and help protect coastlines, are being cleared to make way for massive shrimp farms.
I’ve flirted with the idea of veganism, having recently written a few articles on the subject of alt-meats and interviewed the cofounders of a seaweed protein start-up as well as a vegan astrophysicist-turned-food scientist. I’m also intrigued by some newcomers to the marketplace — plant-based crab cakes! Vegan shrimp! Fishless fillets! Even a bluefin(less) tuna! — produced by tech companies attracting VC support and consumers seeking more responsible culinary choices.
But enough about all this. Are these products any good? Would it be possible to feed my family these meat-free seafood analogues for an entire week? Could I expiate guilt while shoring up our Omega-3s? I decided to give it a shot.
Monday: Vegan Shrimp Scampi
My experiment with plant-based seafood began at Orchard Grocer, a vegan grocery and sandwich shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The neighborhood is steeped in immigrant history and no small amount of irony: Old-school delis peddling smoked fish and kosher meats have been edged out by hip vegan restaurants. These hotspots peddle similar fare, but instead of standard dishes prepared from animal flesh, everything is made with plant proteins and mysterious ingredients like konjac and algal oil.
With this in mind, I decided to pick up a couple of alt-meat sandwiches to see if the Poppy (chickpea “tuna” salad with the works, on marble rye) or the Marlowe (a Reuben made with beet-brined Blackbird seitan and Violife provolone) could pass for the real thing. As I would discover later, these items taken out of the box or pouch might’ve given me pause, but when prepared by an expert they were surprisingly good. My carnivorous husband went so far as to call the Marlowe delicious with the texture of corned beef, and my Poppy was surprisingly tunalike, with a faint umami flavor complemented by a nice, chewy texture. I ordered a side of carrot lox as well, and after my initial reaction — it’s just carrot! It’s bullshit! — a pleasant smokiness lingered.
I was excited to kick off faux seafood week with vegan shrimp, because not only is the crustacean my 6-year-old’s all-time favorite food, my husband is allergic to it. It also is among the most ethically dubious things you can eat in terms of environmental destruction and human rights abuses.
Scampi is easy and usually a crowd-pleaser, so I set a pot of water to boil for the pasta and opened a package of vegan shrimp. These facsimiles, made with modified starch, pea protein, and glucomannan (a dietary fiber derived from the konjac root), had an oddly rough texture and resembled nothing so much as a baker’s dozen of severed fingers.
Uncooked shrimp are dull gray in color — only when heated do they perk up and turn pink, curling as they cook. These vegan shrimp came pink and stayed pink. They’re also curled straight out of the bag. Without these visual cues, I had no idea how long to cook them. I sautéed them for a few minutes, adding ample amounts of garlic and lemon. I found them edible and somewhat shrimpy in flavor, but their gummy worm-like texture, which slowly calcified through dinner, had an unsettling uniformity to it.
Adrienne Day
Texture is critical when creating plant-based seafoods and the hardest thing to get right, says food biotechnologist Sonia Hurtado, cofounder and chief science officer at Kuleana, which has a bluefin tuna analogue in the pipeline. “If you want to do a cooked fish like cod, you can do it with current processing technologies, but you can’t do that when you want to mimic raw flesh” for something like tuna or salmon sashimi.
Hurtado wouldn’t tell me how Kuleana approximates the texture of raw fish beyond saying “enzymes and algae” play into it, but she says it works. “When we did blind taste tests, people thought our product was real bluefin tuna,” she says. Kuleana, which recently raised $3 million in VC funding, plans on launching their product this year, starting with restaurants and then moving into retail stores.
Tuesday: Fish and Chips
While plant-based nigiri might turn off sushi fans, there is a growing appetite for faux fish. That might explain why Gardein’s fishless filets are seemingly ubiquitous, at least in Brooklyn — even my local deli carries them. “It’s the biggest seller in the U.S. by far,” says Jennifer Lamy, senior manager of the sustainable seafood initiative at the Good Food Institute. Granted that has more to do with the lack of competition than anything else. But that, too, is changing: Sophie’s Kitchen recently struck a deal with Walmart to carry its faux crab cakes and scallops. Even a giant brand like Nestlé is casting its line, test-marketing its fish-free Vuna in Switzerland.
The goal of the alt-meat sector is to reach a flexitarian audience — the vegan-curious, if you will — and convince people that their products excel on moral, environmental, and health grounds, and can compete, cheek by jowl, with equally delicious animal proteins. “You can’t overstate how important it is that these products taste good,” Lamy says.
Monica Talbert knows how critical that is. In 2013, she and her sister teamed up with their mother to found Van Cleve Seafood, which developed the Chesapeake blue crab pie endorsed by the likes of Oprah. But Talbert saw firsthand the human and environmental cost of the seafood industry, and in May 2020 she founded The Plant Based Seafood Co. One of its first products was a faux crab cake so authentic that people called it the best crab cake they’ve ever had, she says. Her phone started ringing with queries from around the world. “It was then that I saw the potential opportunity and the potential impact of plant-based seafood,” says Talbert.
Baked and served with french fries and a dollop of ketchup, Gardein’s filets made for a more than passable fish-and-chips dinner. It tasted much like your standard fish fillet, though the Gardein “fish” filling had a spongy rather than flaky quality. That didn’t stop us from quickly polishing it off, though.
Wednesday: Vegan Smoked Lox and Cavi-art
The idea of caviar without the fish eggs becomes much more palatable when you check the price of the real stuff. A 100-gram jar of Russ & Daughters’ Osetra Gueldenstaedtii caviar will set you back about $500. The same amount will buy 72 jars of Cavi-art, available in both black (the “fancy” stuff) and orange roe, the kind you often find in sushi rolls. A purist certainly won’t be satisfied with the fake stuff, but the fact that roe-producing sturgeon are teetering on the brink of extinction might soon leave them with few other options.
I’m hardly a purist, as my experience with caviar is limited, but I found these seaweed-based analogues impressively realistic, with the tensile quality of caviar. They left a pleasing salty-umami aftertaste, though they didn’t burst open and melt in the mouth quite the same way.
I wasn’t sure how to serve them — I was running low on blini and Dom Perignon —so I included them on a bagel platter with Sophie’s Kitchen’s vegan smoked salmon and other fixings. The vegan alternative to brined salmon had a strange rubbery quality and came out of the package soaking wet — I literally had to wring it out over the sink. And the taste didn’t fool anyone. My husband took one bite and gave the rest to the cat, who didn’t seem interested in it, either. It had a decently smoky flavor though, and when I sandwiched it in a bagel with the works, I was able to more or less pretend it was the real deal.
Adrienne Day
Thursday: Fish-Free Tuna Blind Taste Test
So far, I have to say, I was impressed by the vegan seafood I’d tried. That ended with faux tuna. I really wanted to like it, especially since Good Catch seems like a company in it for the right reasons. It also is aiming for something that competes nutritionally with heart-healthy fish. “They do this by adding algal oil to their protein base, which is made from various plant proteins,” Largeman-Roth says. Algal oil, which is derived from certain marine algae, is an excellent source of DHA omega-3. “It also gives the product a ‘from the sea’ flavor, which may or may not be to your liking,” she says.
I cut open a pouch of Good Catch “naked” fish-free tuna and hoo-boy, did I take an instant dislike to it! I can’t tell you if it was the algal oil, the product’s brownish hue, or its musky odor, but neither mayo nor dill nor salt and pepper, lemon, or even sriracha could disguise its flaccid, almost-tuna qualities. A blind taste test with Bumble Bee tuna fooled no one, though my husband proclaimed the fish-free tuna “good,” albeit slightly grittier than tuna — but he also eats tinned sardines (topped with yogurt!) for lunch.
This brings me to another issue facing some of these vegan seafoods: the “uncanny valley” problem. How much should they resemble the real deal? When biting into a steak, you encounter buttery flesh, but also fat, gristle, and bone. Is this what we crave? Is a desire to strip flesh from bone while spitting out gristle somehow encoded in our DNA?
Friday: Good Catch Crabless Cakes
For the final evening of my experiment, I pan-fried Good Catch crabless crab cakes and paired them with homemade remoulade. I served them to friends, who happen to be seafood lovers, in our corona-pod and the cakes were gone within minutes. Everyone agreed they tasted just like crab, but I have to wonder if the other flavors in the mix — the breadcrumb coating, a squeeze of lemon, a dusting of parsley — fooled our brains into thinking we were eating genuine crab, not “a six-plant protein blend.” But with our bellies full, wine glasses low, and appetites satiated, it didn’t seem to matter.
Ten years ago, I worked in the United States Senate and helped draft and pass the Physician Payments Sunshine Act. The law requires companies to report monies and gifts they give physicians, which are known to influence what doctors prescribe or promote. Thanks to the Sunshine Act, you can look up doctors on a public database to see who is paying them and how much. Several other countries have passed or are considering similar laws.
Nothing similar exists in other disciplines like plant biology, climate science, or toxicology. We need a “sunshine law” for science that would expose all sorts of conflicts of interest and industry manipulation that skew research on food, synthetic chemicals, pesticides, air pollution, genetic technology, and the climate.
Since the 1990s, tobacco and the industries allied with it, such as the food, chemical, and fossil fuel sectors, have worked especially hard to influence a field called risk analysis, which determines whether products cause harm. The agri-chemical giant Monsanto has been accused in recent years of manipulating employees at the Environmental Protection Agency on the dangers of glyphosate; petrochemical companies publish questionable studies on air pollution in corporate-friendly journals; and biotech lobbyists promote news stories that attack government agencies.
The fossil fuel industry has also funded research departments at prestigious American universities, including Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and UC Berkeley. Most of the climate science community remains silent on this, but two students at Princeton recently exposed how their university has been influenced by companies such as ExxonMobil and BP, which spend paltry sums funding academics to buy social credibility — even as they pour enormous amounts into lobbying against bills that limit greenhouse gas emissions.
In some cases, scientists have denied or attempted to dismiss peer-reviewed research showing how financial influence biases science. Five years ago, the New York Times ran a front-page story exposing the undisclosed ties between Kevin Folta, a plant biologist at the University of Florida, and Monsanto. Cheerleaders for GMO agriculture characterized the Times article as “laden with falsehoods, improper inferences and innuendoes.” (Folta sued the paper for defamation, but a judge dismissed the case.)
The scientific community has not been entirely naive about corporate influence, and some experts have been discussing the problem since the late 1960s. In 1970, critics charged the National Academies of Science with pro-industry bias because chemical and fossil fuel insiders dominated a committee examining the health effects of airborne lead. The following year, the academies approved its first conflict of interest policy, which required scientists serving on its panels to disclose any ties to special interests. Ironically, the scientist who led that reform faced his own accusations of corporate bias for sitting on the board of a food conglomerate.
Historically, biomedicine has been both heavily influenced by industry and a leader in pushing back. In 1984, the New England Journal of Medicine became the first prominent research journal to adopt a financial conflict of interest rule requiring authors to disclose any ties to special interests. JAMA endorsed a similar policy the next year. Shortly after, the National Institutes of Health — the largest funder of biomedicine on the planet — enacted a disclosure policy for grantees. Eventually, the journal Science passed a conflict of interest policy in 1992, and Nature came to the table in 2001.
Of course, experts debate the effectiveness of these policies and whether they go far enough. Corporations have workarounds like creating a “council” or “committee” through a PR firm, as the agency Hill & Knowlton did for tobacco companies when it launched the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC). As Harvard historian Allan Brandt documented, TIRC funding of academic researchers helped chill scientific discourse and create doubt that smoking caused disease, while simultaneously granting tobacco companies the prestige that comes from associating with universities.
Climate science and other research fields need to catch up and show greater transparency in corporate funding. First, all science journals should implement strong conflict of interest policies, as are common in medical journals, that require study authors to disclose any financial interests. The federal government already places such requirements on scientists who receive federal grants and could exert greater impact by requiring them to publish taxpayer-funded research only in journals with strong financial transparency policies.
We should also demand that America’s science institutions require more training in science ethics. (When national researchers surveyed top research institutions, they found that those with medical schools exceeded federal mandates for instruction in “responsible conduct” in research). Ethics education should emphasize how corporations have influenced broad swaths of American science.
Finally, we must hold the media accountable. In September, the New York Times published an article that cited microbiologist Alex Berezow of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) as an expert on coronavirus misinformation. But the Times did not note that Berezow is the organization’s VP of science communications — which is problematic because ACSH has over the years received funding from the likes of Chevron, Coca-Cola, Bayer, Monsanto, McDonald’s, and the tobacco conglomerate Altria. Berezow has also attacked Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists at the Times for exposing corporate ties between academics and the agrochemical industry. Readers deserve to be informed of such associations.
In 2017, Forbes deleted several articles written by Henry Miller and Kavin Senapathy that reported favorably on GMO agriculture after the New York Times reported that Monsanto ghost wrote one of Miller’s articles.
Corporations have been influencing science for as long as science has informed public health policies. The more sunlight we can let shine on that influence, the better.
The views expressed here reflect those of the author. Fix is committed to publishing a diversity of voices. Got a bold idea or fresh news analysis? Submit your op-ed draft, along with a note about who you are, to fix@grist.org.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Southeast needed a healer — someone to give back at least a little of what slavery had taken from the land and the people. Black scientist George Washington Carver stepped into that role and, in the process, revolutionized farming as we know it.
Most Americans remember him simply as the “Peanut Man,” summarizing his life’s work with what was, arguably, his least important accomplishment. Oh, sure, Carver did discover around 300 uses for peanuts, from soap to wood stains to cooking oil — but those things were almost beside the point. He didn’t set out to create new kinds of milk and paper, and, to be fair, many of his inventions never took off. (Despite misconceptions, peanut butter is not in his portfolio.) The legume played a supporting role in his bigger mission: helping Black farmers throughout the South grow enough food to sustain their families and free themselves from the oppression of sharecropping.
That noble cause led Carver to develop farming methods that increased crop yields, safeguarded ecological health, and revitalized soil ravaged by the overproduction of cotton, the linchpin of the South’s economy. No less importantly, Carver devoted much of his life to teaching formerly enslaved people how to use those techniques to achieve a measure of independence.
“Carver was one of the founders of the modern organic movement, which has changed the face of agriculture and will continue to in the future if we want to have a hospitable planet,” says Leah Penniman, a 2019 Grist 50 Fixer, co-executive director of Soul Fire Farm in Petersburg, New York, and a student of Carver’s work. “Flattening him to just a pinup with a peanut in an elementary school corridor does not do him justice.”
Monuments and colleges bear Carver’s name, yet few textbooks offer a full picture of his remarkable accomplishments, let alone address the political motivations behind his work. But recognizing them underscores the fact that the fight for environmental justice is not new, and we can learn crucial lessons from its past leaders.
Farming for liberation
George Washington Carver was born into slavery during the Civil War, although the exact year remains something of a mystery. His father was killed before his birth, and Confederate slave raiders kidnapped his mother, whom he never saw again, when he was an infant. Carver grew up in a variety of homes before leaving Missouri at 11 to attend school in Kansas. The one constant in his life was an abiding love of botany. Carver learned about gardening and herbal medicine from each of the women who cared for him, and he often spent his days collecting herbs and flowers and experimenting with natural pesticides and fertilizers. He was soon renowned for curing sick crops and houseplants, leading people to call him the “plant doctor.”
His talents led him to Iowa State Agricultural School, where he earned a master’s in agriculture in 1896. His research on fungal infections in soybeans impressed Booker T. Washington, who founded what is now known as Tuskegee University in Alabama. Washington invited Carver to help start its agricultural school, where he became a beloved professor. Still, Carver’s passion lay beyond the classroom: He wanted to liberate Black farmers from a system designed to keep them dependent upon white landowners.
George Washington Carver (front, center) with his colleagues at the Tuskegee Institute in 1902.Frances Benjamin Johnston / Creative Commons
After emancipation, the federal government promised Black families “40 acres and a mule.” But President Andrew Johnson reneged and returned the land to white plantation owners. That essentially forced Black farmers to lease land in exchange for a portion of their harvest, giving rise to a new system of oppression: sharecropping.
Indentured farmers struggled to grow enough food to survive, let alone enrich their landlords. The overproduction of a cotton monoculture had drained the soil of its nutrients. “When my train left the golden wheat fields and the tall green corn of Iowa for the acres of cotton, nothing but cotton, my heart sank a little,” Carver recalled in a 1941 radio broadcast. “Fields and hillsides cracked and scarred with gullies and deep rut. Everything looked hungry: the land, the cotton, the cattle, and the people.”
Carver took to his lab, seeking a prescription for Alabama’s ailing soil. He discovered that rotating nitrogen-rich cover crops of peanuts, cowpeas, and sweet potatoes would reinvigorate the land, increasing yields and diversifying farmers’ food supply. Carver also promoted free, all-natural fertilizers like swamp muck and compost that were kinder to the earth. Such things are good for the planet, of course, but also good for those working the land; helping Black farmers grow more food while spending less money got them closer to food sovereignty, something Carver understood was essential to their liberation.
“Whoever controls the food controls the people,” says Penniman, who has taken Carver’s lessons to heart. Soul Fire Farms distributes fresh produce to Black and brown communities while teaching people how to grow their own food and fight for a more equitable agricultural system — just as Carver did more than a century ago. “For us to have self-determination means that we need to have control over our food supply. The yearning to independently produce one’s own sustenance is core to what it means to be human.”
As more farmers grew peanuts to improve their soil, they found themselves with a surplus. Carver gave this problem a lot of thought, waking before dawn to walk through the woods near campus seeking guidance from God. He discovered that the legume is remarkably useful, and developed a long list of applications in an effort to create a viable market for this new crop.
Although Carver wasn’t vocal in his views, his actions revealed his revolutionary thinking. He never tired of teaching farmers how to nourish the earth — and themselves. He hosted free seminars at the university and wrote bulletins filled with farming advice and recipes. He designed a mobile classroom, called the Jesup Agricultural Wagon, and visited far-flung counties to offer hands-on demonstrations. (The outreach was so popular the United States Department of Agriculture follows a similar model even now.) “He and his team found the farms in need of help,” Penniman says. “They fixed fences, planted cover crops, took care of animals. This idea of meeting people where they’re at remains an important lesson in organizing.”
Carver’s emphasis on food justice and sovereignty is no less urgent today. White people own 98 percent of rural land in America, while Black families are twice as likely as white ones to experience hunger.
In a flower, infinity
Carver wasn’t focused only on nourishing people — he wanted to nourish the Earth. He understood that agriculture and ecology are inseparable, and that land needs crop diversity to thrive. He advocated woodland preservation as a way of improving topsoil. His recommendation that farmers feed their hogs acorns created a business case for forest management. And the natural pesticides he recommended weren’t just cheaper — they were greener. “This was two whole generations before the opening of the Rodale Institute, which is widely lauded as one of the founders of the organic movement,” Penniman says. “His work was groundbreaking.”
Carver in his laboratory circa 1923. Corbis Historical / Getty
Carver saw nature as valuable in and of itself, an unusual perspective at the time. Although he stood at the vanguard of the early conservation movement, he rarely gets credit for contributing to its bedrock philosophies alongside thinkers like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir.
Like those men, Carver’s connection to nature went beyond the scientific to the spiritual. “I am not merely touching that flower,” he once said. “I am touching infinity. That little flower existed long before there were human beings on this earth. It will continue to exist for thousands, yes, millions of years to come.” As a child, Carver displayed a knack for communicating with the natural world, something he carried with him throughout his life. “He was able to tune into something beyond the cacophony of human influence around him, and really check in about what the Earth wanted,” Penniman says.
Today, the holistic, restorative farming approach he favored often is seen as an “emerging” environmental antidote. Permaculture, as some now call it, extracts carbon from the atmosphere, increases yields, and improves crop hardiness in a warming world. President Biden promises that sustainable agriculture will play a role in his climate policy. The success of Netflix’s star-studded documentary Kiss the Ground reveals a growing appetite for this once-wonky idea.
But many people whitewash the history of the practice. Indigenous communities have been practicing sustainable farming for millennia. Carver reintroduced it to the South because he understood that when land suffers, those who tend it do, too. Emphasizing that link is a key strategy for contemporary organizations like the Sunrise Movement, and you can draw a line between Carver’s beliefs, the Green New Deal, and the recognition that social and economic concerns are inextricable from ecological ones. They’re all part of what Carver saw as an infinite, interconnected web.
Carver became famous — in Black and white communities alike — for his work. The NAACP awarded him its Spingarn Medal in 1923. Time named him a “Black Leonardo” in 1941. And in 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved the creation of the George Washington Carver National Monument, the first dedicated to an African American and the first to honor someone other than a president.
So why, then, is Carver’s complex legacy reduced to peanuts?
Devyn Springer, a Black artist and writer in Atlanta, suggests that it’s because Carver’s work so vehemently challenges the capitalist status quo. Land, in Carver’s view, was not a commodity. It is something to be protected — treat it well, and it sustains us. But of course, that curbs profit and growth. And teaching Black farmers how to tap the land’s abundance, as Carver did, upsets the racial and economic hierarchy on which America was built. Recognizing that as we tell the whole story of Carver’s life is essential to celebrating his past — and safeguarding our future.
“There is a mythology that Black and brown folks have not been involved with the environmental movement, or have not taken leadership in it,” Penniman says. “We need to reclaim our history and say to young people, ‘When you take a stand for the Earth and for the human community, you’re not making that up or doing a white-people thing. You’re honoring the legacy of your ancestors.’”
Tuskegee’s most famous soil scientist saw miracles in the peanut, heard God in the forest, and sowed liberation in the soil. In doing so, he took some of the first steps in the long march toward racial and environmental justice that continues today.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Southeast needed a healer — someone to give back at least a little of what slavery had taken from the land and the people. Black scientist George Washington Carver stepped into that role and, in the process, revolutionized farming as we know it.
Most Americans remember him simply as the “Peanut Man,” summarizing his life’s work with what was, arguably, his least important accomplishment. Oh, sure, Carver did discover around 300 uses for peanuts, from soap to wood stains to cooking oil — but those things were almost beside the point. He didn’t set out to create new kinds of milk and paper, and, to be fair, many of his inventions never took off. (Despite misconceptions, peanut butter is not in his portfolio.) The legume played a supporting role in his bigger mission: helping Black farmers throughout the South grow enough food to sustain their families and free themselves from the oppression of sharecropping.
That noble cause led Carver to develop farming methods that increased crop yields, safeguarded ecological health, and revitalized soil ravaged by the overproduction of cotton, the linchpin of the South’s economy. No less importantly, Carver devoted much of his life to teaching formerly enslaved people how to use those techniques to achieve a measure of independence.
“Carver was one of the founders of the modern organic movement, which has changed the face of agriculture and will continue to in the future if we want to have a hospitable planet,” says Leah Penniman, a 2019 Grist 50 Fixer, co-executive director of Soul Fire Farm in Petersburg, New York, and a student of Carver’s work. “Flattening him to just a pinup with a peanut in an elementary school corridor does not do him justice.”
Monuments and colleges bear Carver’s name, yet few textbooks offer a full picture of his remarkable accomplishments, let alone address the political motivations behind his work. But recognizing them underscores the fact that the fight for environmental justice is not new, and we can learn crucial lessons from its past leaders.
Farming for liberation
George Washington Carver was born into slavery during the Civil War, although the exact year remains something of a mystery. His father was killed before his birth, and Confederate slave raiders kidnapped his mother, whom he never saw again, when he was an infant. Carver grew up in a variety of homes before leaving Missouri at 11 to attend school in Kansas. The one constant in his life was an abiding love of botany. Carver learned about gardening and herbal medicine from each of the women who cared for him, and he often spent his days collecting herbs and flowers and experimenting with natural pesticides and fertilizers. He was soon renowned for curing sick crops and houseplants, leading people to call him the “plant doctor.”
His talents led him to Iowa State Agricultural School, where he earned a master’s in agriculture in 1896. His research on fungal infections in soybeans impressed Booker T. Washington, who founded what is now known as Tuskegee University in Alabama. Washington invited Carver to help start its agricultural school, where he became a beloved professor. Still, Carver’s passion lay beyond the classroom: He wanted to liberate Black farmers from a system designed to keep them dependent upon white landowners.
George Washington Carver (front, center) with his colleagues at the Tuskegee Institute in 1902.Frances Benjamin Johnston / Creative Commons
After emancipation, the federal government promised Black families “40 acres and a mule.” But President Andrew Johnson reneged and returned the land to white plantation owners. That essentially forced Black farmers to lease land in exchange for a portion of their harvest, giving rise to a new system of oppression: sharecropping.
Indentured farmers struggled to grow enough food to survive, let alone enrich their landlords. The overproduction of a cotton monoculture had drained the soil of its nutrients. “When my train left the golden wheat fields and the tall green corn of Iowa for the acres of cotton, nothing but cotton, my heart sank a little,” Carver recalled in a 1941 radio broadcast. “Fields and hillsides cracked and scarred with gullies and deep rut. Everything looked hungry: the land, the cotton, the cattle, and the people.”
Carver took to his lab, seeking a prescription for Alabama’s ailing soil. He discovered that rotating nitrogen-rich cover crops of peanuts, cowpeas, and sweet potatoes would reinvigorate the land, increasing yields and diversifying farmers’ food supply. Carver also promoted free, all-natural fertilizers like swamp muck and compost that were kinder to the earth. Such things are good for the planet, of course, but also good for those working the land; helping Black farmers grow more food while spending less money got them closer to food sovereignty, something Carver understood was essential to their liberation.
“Whoever controls the food controls the people,” says Penniman, who has taken Carver’s lessons to heart. Soul Fire Farms distributes fresh produce to Black and brown communities while teaching people how to grow their own food and fight for a more equitable agricultural system — just as Carver did more than a century ago. “For us to have self-determination means that we need to have control over our food supply. The yearning to independently produce one’s own sustenance is core to what it means to be human.”
As more farmers grew peanuts to improve their soil, they found themselves with a surplus. Carver gave this problem a lot of thought, waking before dawn to walk through the woods near campus seeking guidance from God. He discovered that the legume is remarkably useful, and developed a long list of applications in an effort to create a viable market for this new crop.
Although Carver wasn’t vocal in his views, his actions revealed his revolutionary thinking. He never tired of teaching farmers how to nourish the earth — and themselves. He hosted free seminars at the university and wrote bulletins filled with farming advice and recipes. He designed a mobile classroom, called the Jesup Agricultural Wagon, and visited far-flung counties to offer hands-on demonstrations. (The outreach was so popular the United States Department of Agriculture follows a similar model even now.) “He and his team found the farms in need of help,” Penniman says. “They fixed fences, planted cover crops, took care of animals. This idea of meeting people where they’re at remains an important lesson in organizing.”
Carver’s emphasis on food justice and sovereignty is no less urgent today. White people own 98 percent of rural land in America, while Black families are twice as likely as white ones to experience hunger.
In a flower, infinity
Carver wasn’t focused only on nourishing people — he wanted to nourish the Earth. He understood that agriculture and ecology are inseparable, and that land needs crop diversity to thrive. He advocated woodland preservation as a way of improving topsoil. His recommendation that farmers feed their hogs acorns created a business case for forest management. And the natural pesticides he recommended weren’t just cheaper — they were greener. “This was two whole generations before the opening of the Rodale Institute, which is widely lauded as one of the founders of the organic movement,” Penniman says. “His work was groundbreaking.”
Carver in his laboratory circa 1923.Corbis Historical / Getty
Carver saw nature as valuable in and of itself, an unusual perspective at the time. Although he stood at the vanguard of the early conservation movement, he rarely gets credit for contributing to its bedrock philosophies alongside thinkers like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir.
Like those men, Carver’s connection to nature went beyond the scientific to the spiritual. “I am not merely touching that flower,” he once said. “I am touching infinity. That little flower existed long before there were human beings on this earth. It will continue to exist for thousands, yes, millions of years to come.” As a child, Carver displayed a knack for communicating with the natural world, something he carried with him throughout his life. “He was able to tune into something beyond the cacophony of human influence around him, and really check in about what the Earth wanted,” Penniman says.
Today, the holistic, restorative farming approach he favored often is seen as an “emerging” environmental antidote. Permaculture, as some now call it, extracts carbon from the atmosphere, increases yields, and improves crop hardiness in a warming world. President Biden promises that sustainable agriculture will play a role in his climate policy. The success of Netflix’s star-studded documentary Kiss the Ground reveals a growing appetite for this once-wonky idea.
But many people whitewash the history of the practice. Indigenous communities have been practicing sustainable farming for millennia. Carver reintroduced it to the South because he understood that when land suffers, those who tend it do, too. Emphasizing that link is a key strategy for contemporary organizations like the Sunrise Movement, and you can draw a line between Carver’s beliefs, the Green New Deal, and the recognition that social and economic concerns are inextricable from ecological ones. They’re all part of what Carver saw as an infinite, interconnected web.
Carver became famous — in Black and white communities alike — for his work. The NAACP awarded him its Spingarn Medal in 1923. Time named him a “Black Leonardo” in 1941. And in 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved the creation of the George Washington Carver National Monument, the first dedicated to an African American and the first to honor someone other than a president.
So why, then, is Carver’s complex legacy reduced to peanuts?
Devyn Springer, a Black artist and writer in Atlanta, suggests that it’s because Carver’s work so vehemently challenges the capitalist status quo. Land, in Carver’s view, was not a commodity. It is something to be protected — treat it well, and it sustains us. But of course, that curbs profit and growth. And teaching Black farmers how to tap the land’s abundance, as Carver did, upsets the racial and economic hierarchy on which America was built. Recognizing that as we tell the whole story of Carver’s life is essential to celebrating his past — and safeguarding our future.
“There is a mythology that Black and brown folks have not been involved with the environmental movement, or have not taken leadership in it,” Penniman says. “We need to reclaim our history and say to young people, ‘When you take a stand for the Earth and for the human community, you’re not making that up or doing a white-people thing. You’re honoring the legacy of your ancestors.’”
Tuskegee’s most famous soil scientist saw miracles in the peanut, heard God in the forest, and sowed liberation in the soil. In doing so, he took some of the first steps in the long march toward racial and environmental justice that continues today.
Last month, more than 5,500 people gathered online for the inaugural Big Bold Jewish Climate Fest. Over a span of five days, participants zoomed in and out of 167 virtual events ranging from music to comedy to conversations about solar energy, racial justice, youth activism, and more. It was a time for conviviality, even levity, at the end of a long, difficult year. Yet the folks behind the event have an urgent goal: They want to make climate change a central moral issue for the Jewish community. “We need to understand our role and our voice in a larger conversation, and make sure that we’re connecting to other communities that are affected by the climate crisis and have authority and power to help drive solutions,” says Lisa Colton, executive producer of the fest. “Progress requires all of us to put our hands in and collaborate in ways that may be unprecedented.”
When she isn’t organizing big, bold, Jewish climate festivals (or great big Jewish food festivals), Colton runs a consulting business that helps Jewish organizations and social causes flourish in the digital age. She was also involved in seeding and producing a Seattle-wide Jewish climate festival in early 2020, which inspired this year’s event. Fix caught up with her to talk about the ethos behind the festival, the foundations for climate action in Judaism, and how she sees the Jewish community participating in the climate conversation. Her remarks have been edited for length and clarity.
A big, bold vision
We designed this as a festival rather than a conference, for a few reasons. Jews have been through a lot over the course of our peoplehood — which spans thousands of years — and we’re resilient in part because we make sure to pace and sustain ourselves. We knew that, if one of the goals of this festival was to pull well-intentioned people off the sidelines to become proactive participants in solving the climate crisis, it wouldn’t work if it was only intellectual and guilt-ridden and heavy, and didn’t make them feel good.
We have to do this together and sustain ourselves for the long haul. There’s a Jewish principle that each of us is not obligated to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it. We wanted to embody that in the design and culture of the festival. We also drew from the traditional concept of a festival from the agrarian days 2,000-plus years ago, where people would bring part of their harvest to the Temple in Jerusalem. Everyone would contribute. Whether you’re a rabbi talking about the religious underpinnings of environmental stewardship, or an elected leader creating policy, or a comedian sustaining the community with some laughter, we all have something to contribute.
Tu BiShvat, the date that we picked for the fest, is the new year of the trees. The Jewish tradition is incredibly focused on agricultural cycles. Many of our holidays and festivals are tied to planting and harvesting, based on the ecosystem of the Middle East. This holiday has gone through a number of iterations, recently being known as kind of the “Jewish Earth Day.” It seemed like the perfect point in the calendar to anchor our conversation about climate. This festival is building on the tradition and the values within the holiday of Tu BiShvat to re-energize it, and make it a time for Jews to deepen our understanding and make additional commitments to being part of the solution to our climate crisis.
The work ahead
The work is definitely not done. We’re just getting started. By coming together, raising our voices, and engaging so many of our community’s leaders, we have put climate action on the communal agenda in a way we had not seen previously. We know that Jews care about climate. From exit polling in the November election, one study showed that it was the number two issue for Jews, COVID being the first. It is a high priority, particularly for younger generations. We also know that the organized Jewish world has for a long time been very focused on what’s good for the Jews. Antisemitism in our current political climate, both in the U.S. and globally, is a very high priority that we have to focus on. But we wanted this festival to hold leaders accountable for our role and our voice in the climate crisis as well — and remind us that what’s good for humanity is good for the Jews. Our values, as stewards of the earth, require us to act even when it’s not only about our own community. There’s a call to action here that is historically unique.
Eric Fingerhut, the CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America, was one of our keynote speakers, and acknowledged the role that the organized Jewish community can and should play in being part of the solution to the climate crisis. The question is, what does it look like next? Throughout the festival, there were a number of very specific recommendations and ideas — from putting solar panels on the roofs of synagogues to divesting pension funds and endowments from fossil fuels to making human composting fit in with Jewish traditions around death. Collectively, the community can continue to pressure our elected leaders to make policy in cities, states, and the nation to help move the needle.
The spiritual side of climate action
I think that the best spiritual traditions — whether it’s organized religion or yoga or Peloton or anything else — are a practice more so than a set of rules that you do or don’t abide by. They provide an architecture to help us lead more intentional, reflective, healthy, connected lives. Judaism, for one, is deeply communal. There are certain rituals or prayers that you can only do in a group of at least 10 people. I think marrying that culture and tradition with these conversations about climate is an opportunity to remember how we are very much part of larger systems. That helps us find points of connection, where our decision-making isn’t just about ourselves — it’s about our family, our community, and our relationship with the earth.
To me, composting is the easiest way to be sustainable. If you drop off food scraps at a compost site, you can actually see them turn into the finished product used to grow more food. Every other form of recycling, you have to follow it from transfer station to transfer station to transfer station. I want to see the whole process, and I want to create that resource myself. That’s why I chose composting.
Adrienne Day
