Grist 50 2024

When the Pentagon announced in 2013 that it planned to turn part of the island of Pagan in the Northern Mariana Islands into a bombing range, many Indigenous residents were shocked. They had already agreed to allow the U.S. military to lease an entire island in their U.S. commonwealth for bombing practice, and two-thirds of another for a military base, and now the military wanted even more land for destructive training.

Among those outraged was Theresa (Isa) Arriola, an Indigenous woman of Chamorro, Kosraean, and Irish descent, from the island of Saipan, the commonwealth’s capital.

“This is land that’s connected to our very being,” she thought. “It’s just so presumptive, so cavalier, this idea that you can just take.”

Over the next several years, Arriola read and decoded thousands of pages of dense environmental impact statements, drafted opinion pieces, and spoke with local media about the plans. She helped organize community meetings and push for a local legislative resolution to halt military planning. Along with longtime community advocate Cinta Kaipat (who passed away in 2023), she also co-founded the grassroots organization Our Common Wealth 670 to increase awareness of militarism.

The community’s resistance worked: In 2022, the military abandoned its Pagan bombing range proposal. But Arriola says there’s more work to do to empower her community and illuminate how militarization affects their daily lives.

She sees her advocacy as intertwined with climate justice — not only is the U.S. military one of the world’s biggest polluters, but defense is an easy excuse to justify rolling back environmental protections.

“It’s not just about reducing emissions,” she said. “We also have to take a look at what are the daily and mundane ways that militarism is skewing our relationship with everyone around us.”

When Hurricane Katrina made landfall, Alicia Brown was 7 years old and living in rural southern Mississippi. She and her family evacuated. Her grandparents, who lived on the Gulf Coast, had to be rescued via boat.

“Seeing how rapidly that storm intensified — and knowing that the actions that we’re taking today make storms like that infinitely more likely — really motivated me to find clean energy solutions that were also workable,” Brown said.

Brown, an engineer by training, has sought to implement those solutions at an often overlooked site for effective climate action: municipal government. “We vastly underestimate what we have control over” at the local level, she said.

As an energy analyst for the city of Savannah, Georgia, she helped write its plan for achieving 100 percent clean energy by 2035. But one thing the city couldn’t control was its energy grid; the most important decisions about power generation were being made by state-level utility regulators. So Brown brought together a coalition of five cities across the state with similar clean energy goals to testify at the Georgia Public Service Commission’s hearings — an innovation that’s since been replicated by groups of cities in other states.

Until June, Brown served as Savannah’s interim director of sustainability. While working for the city, she dreamed up a plan to provide low-income residents with rooftop solar arrays. The pilot program was so successful that this year the EPA awarded $156 million to Georgia BRIGHT, an organization Brown now runs, to expand it across the state.

Perhaps one trait unites her diverse accomplishments, and it’s what she plans to bring to her new role at Georgia BRIGHT: “I’m really good at seeing problems and mobilizing the stakeholders to actually come up with a solution and do what was previously seen as impossible.”

Jessica Dandridge-Smith grew up in Louisiana, where “water is a part of everybody’s story.” Hers took a radical turn the day before her 16th birthday, when Hurricane Katrina hit. Seeing the devastation, and its concentration in New Orleans’ low-income, Black neighborhoods, angered her. “My mom was like, ‘You need to do something with all that frustration and that anger,’” she said.

Over the next 14 years, Dandridge-Smith worked with more than two dozen organizations, developing a deep knowledge of community engagement, politics, and the South.

In 2019, she became executive director of The Water Collaborative. A group of engineers and architects in New Orleans had founded the organization four years prior to address failings in the city’s approach to water management. “I was asked to be the ED not because I had a background in environmental science or in hydrology. It was because I have a background in people,” Dandridge-Smith said.

She refocused the organization’s mission on environmental and water justice, tackling projects from green infrastructure and storm resilience to water access, quality, and affordability.

One big push is for a stormwater utility fee that would shift the cost of municipal stormwater drainage from taxpayers to companies, nonprofits, and state entities. In addition to financing operation of the city’s massive pump system, this revenue would support stormwater resilience efforts like reforestation and home retrofits. Every aspect of the proposal was written with community input — not one district was left out of the process, Dandridge-Smith said. She and her collaborators hope to see the measure on the city’s ballot next year.

Dandridge-Smith’s work also makes space for joy, whether it’s a pool party fundraiser or an educational boat trip with local artists. “We’re always trying to find innovative ways to have fun, exciting conversations with water at the center.”

When Monica Huertas bought a house near the Port of Providence, Rhode Island, she was proud of the achievement it represented for her family. She was raised between Providence and Puerto Rico and had experienced periods of homelessness. “We thought, ‘This is great — kind of like the American dream,’” she recalled.

But soon, she realized something was very wrong. She was advised against growing tomatoes in her backyard. Her 1-year-old son had high levels of lead in his blood, and another of her children was hospitalized repeatedly for asthma exacerbation.

People near Providence’s deepwater port are exposed to air pollution from the area’s high concentration of heavy industry. “We have tar, we have oil, we have gas, we have salt piles, concrete, asphalt — very bad, bottom-of-the-barrel things,” said Huertas. And many residents don’t know that the area’s high rates of asthma and cancer aren’t normal.

She decided to do something. First, she organized a campaign to keep a proposed liquefied natural gas facility out of the port. Although that effort was unsuccessful, in 2020, Huertas turned her efforts into an organization committed to fighting the expansion of toxic industries: the People’s Port Authority — so named because, unlike other harbors, the Port of Providence lacks a central governing structure that residents can hold accountable for environmental injustices.

In its short life, the People’s Port Authority has successfully halted a liquefied propane gas project, helped write Providence’s climate justice plan, and directed city funds to “green justice zones” in frontline communities. Above all, Huertas said, it’s about putting the power in residents’ hands. “We work with the community, but we also work with the regulators, so they know that they can’t just come in and ask us to fill a survey out; no, we have to be there.”

Tony Jordan became a leading advocate for parking reform because of a book. The High Cost of Free Parking, by Donald Shoup, outlines the history of American parking minimums, anachronistic laws that require a certain number of parking spaces to be built alongside different types of construction. For a bowling alley, municipal parking minimums might demand three or four spaces per bowling lane, or one per pew at a funeral home.

When Jordan read the book in 2010, he regarded parking lots as many people do: just a part of the landscape. Learning how free parking had helped create sprawling, disconnected cities with inadequate transit infrastructure, “I felt like I was eating a hamburger and reading The Jungle,” he said, referring to Upton Sinclair’s gruesome exposé of the American meatpacking industry.

Shortly after, Jordan began organizing fellow residents of Portland, Oregon, to oppose antiquated parking rules. They won a significant victory in 2016 when the city dropped plans to introduce parking minimums to one of its most densely populated and walkable neighborhoods. But Portland was just the beginning — in 2019, Jordan started the Parking Reform Network, or PRN, as a way to connect experts and organizers around the country fighting against bad parking policy.

Over the past few years, PRN has lent expertise, funding, and organizing power to successful parking reform campaigns in a number of cities, including Duluth, Minnesota, and Austin, Texas, which repealed their parking minimums last year. Ten Oregon cities also passed parking reforms in 2023. Thousands of American cities still have parking minimums on the books, though, and Jordan said it’s his mission over the coming years to help overturn them.

Looking back on her teenage years living with undiagnosed bipolar II disorder, Molly Kawahata described herself as “a hopeless person.” Still, she found inspiration in Barack Obama’s underdog presidential campaign and his emphasis on possibility. “In retrospect, there’s a takeaway in that,” Kawahata said. “You don’t actually need to be a hopeful person for a hopeful message to appeal to you.”

She joined the student effort to turn out voters, and after earning a degree in psychology from UC Berkeley, Kawahata became a White House climate advisor. There, she had a realization. Climate progress requires systemic change. That requires policy, which requires elected officials, who require public support — and that requires people to feel emotionally connected to the issue. “That was the start of me thinking about narrative change, and how if we get the narrative right, then maybe all can follow.”

After leaving the White House, she founded Systemic Impact Strategies, a consulting firm focused on shifting the climate conversation toward solutions and organizational change. Her work leans heavily on the science of hope to inspire action. “’It’s literally like, steps one, two, three, four, five. Here’s what you can do today.”

Kawahata also gained attention as the subject of a Patagonia documentary, The Scale of Hope, documenting her quest to scale one of the most imposing peaks in ice climbing, while reflecting on her mental health journey and climate advocacy.

The film features a montage of clips in which Kawahata repeats a simple call to action: Register people to vote. She continues to focus on elections as a board member for the Environmental Voter Project. And, when it comes to voter turnout, she says hope is crucial there, too. “If people don’t think things can be better and that they have power to make them better, you can’t get mad at them for not voting.”

Growing up in an immigrant family in Miami, Oscar Londoño always understood just how essential immigrant workers are to the economy — and how vulnerable they often are to abuse, exploitation, and, increasingly, climate change.

In law school, he became enamored with the “worker center” model, a type of organization that supports laborers who are excluded from unions and other formal protection, like farmworkers and day laborers — many of whom are undocumented. In 2020, Londoño became co-executive director of WeCount!, a member-led immigrant worker organization in South Florida. He and his team began asking members to share their most pressing concerns. “One thing that we heard constantly over that process was this issue of heat,” he said. In 2021, WeCount! launched ¡Que Calor!, a campaign to bring the issue to the forefront in Miami-Dade County.

“We drafted, alongside workers, a 19-page ordinance that was to us the most comprehensive, the most enforceable, strongest heat standard anywhere in the country,” Londoño said. It would have set an enforceable standard for protections like water, shade, and rest breaks.

But before the proposal could come to a final vote last fall, a coalition of major developers and big ag associations convinced county commissioners to delay the vote — and in the meantime, the state of Florida passed a law banning local governments from setting heat protection standards.

Although the defeat was heartbreaking, the movement is still growing. “Every single time the heat index is high or there’s a heat advisory going on, we now hear from people who say, ‘I can’t stop thinking about the workers not getting water,’” Londoño said. Advocates in Phoenix, who drew inspiration from ¡Que Calor!, worked to pass an ordinance that will protect 10,000 city workers from extreme heat. And WeCount!, working alongside others, continues pushing for a national heat standard.

Cate Mingoya-LaFortune grew up in a Black community in Queens, New York, in the elbow of two major roadways. Adults often told her to study hard, so she could move somewhere healthier.

She listened, moving to Portland, Oregon, for college before finding her way back east to teach middle school in frontline communities much like the one she grew up in. Soon, she found herself repeating the counsel she’d received as a kid: work hard in school, so you can live somewhere with clean air and green spaces.

“It took me a long time to realize what a horrifying thing that is to say to a kid,” Mingoya-LaFortune said, “to tell them that you have to leave your family and your language and your culture to have access to basic human needs.”

So, she pursued a master’s in urban planning from MIT to understand how communities can claim the agency to address environmental injustices. This focus eventually led her to Groundwork USA, where she has spent the last 6 1/2 years building the organization’s Climate Safe Neighborhoods partnership, a network currently spread across 16 cities that helps community-based organizations advance hyperlocal climate solutions.

The approach involves unpacking the historical decisions that shaped a community, collaboratively identifying the most important interventions, and ultimately helping groups understand who to talk to and where to press to make change possible. In San Diego, this approach helped a community get a creek recognized as public infrastructure, then secure funding to begin removing concrete from its banks to reduce flood risks and improve access to outdoor recreation.

To help demystify the machinery of local politics for a broader audience, Mingoya-LaFortune has brought together everything she’s learned into her first book, Climate Action for Busy People, published in June.

After the Maui town of Lāhainā went up in flames, killing 100 people in August last year, survivors and onlookers were left with enormous grief — and endless questions. How could such a horrific event have happened? What could be done to prevent another?

For answers, many turned to the Hawaiʻi Wildfire Management Organization, where Elizabeth Pickett had spent 16 years trying in vain to convince state leaders to take wildfire risks seriously. Pickett, who grew up in California, had moved to Hawaiʻi at age 22 for a fellowship tracking manta rays. She first became interested in wildfires after learning about their effects on coral reef sedimentation, and went on to pursue a master’s in forestry research.

For years, she and her colleagues diligently compiled state and county data to document Hawaiʻi’s fire risk. She organized community meetings to hear input from farmers, ranchers, and other stakeholders. She wrote numerous wildfire plans — including West Maui’s, but also for far-off Pacific nations like Palau. She watched as legislation died, funding never appeared, and inaction persisted, despite the clear and growing threat.

By the time Lāhainā burned last year, Pickett had grown disillusioned. Running a barebones nonprofit was challenging work, on top of parenting in a childcare desert. She briefly wondered whether it was worth it.

Then the fire happened. And suddenly the questions came pouring in. Hawaiʻi teachers needed curricula to teach their students about wildfires. Land managers wanted to know what fire breaks to install. The Department of Health wanted to train their nurses on wildfires. Pickett took the calls.

“We laid that groundwork strategically place by place, layer by layer,” she said. “We were able to meet the moment.”

Pickett hopes her work will ensure that the islands will be prepared for future wildfires, even as climate change increases their threat.

For many Californians, fire is a terrifying consequence of climate change. But to Ryan Reed, who is Karuk, Hupa, and Yurok, it is also an essential part of the ecosystem — one whose absence has increased the risk of catastrophic infernos. “A lot of Indigenous people across the world understand that the use of fire is a significant tool in our toolbox that we need to help us manage the landscape in a sustainable way,” he said.

In 2022, Reed and three other young people co-founded FireGeneration Collaborative to transform the country’s approach to fire management. The group’s priority is diversifying the firefighting workforce and the entities that determine fire policy, with an emphasis on bringing Indigenous and youth perspectives to the table.

Reed, who is working toward a master’s degree in forestry at the University of California, Berkeley, is also a wildland firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service.

FireGen lobbied to get him a seat on the federal advisory committee amending the Northwest Forest Plan, which guides land management in the region. The plan is being amended for the first time since its creation 30 years ago. At 24, he’s by far the youngest person on the committee, and the only wildland firefighter.

It’s challenging, he says, working for an agency that barred his ancestors from practicing their traditional uses of fire, often through violence. But he appreciates the opportunity to bring these issues to light within the committee — and also the need to balance the use of healthy fires with the control of dangerous ones. “At this point in time, we can’t not have fire suppression,” Reed said. “We need to increase the amount of good fire that we have on the landscape, too, but we can’t do one without the other.”

During a two-year stint as a humanitarian relief worker in rural Madagascar, Jean Su witnessed one of the country’s first major climate shocks. A powerful cyclone barreled onto the island nation at the height of the 2006 planting season, drowning thousands of acres of crop fields and causing cases of malaria to spike. Over the next seven months, six more cyclones came through, upending the lives of thousands of agrarian workers — and shifting Su’s career trajectory toward climate justice work.

She returned to the U.S., got a law degree, and eventually began “fighting the U.S. government” with campaigns to phase out fossil fuels. The climate impacts she’d witnessed in Madagascar “all boil back here,” Su told Grist. “The United States is exceptional, because it is the number one fossil fuel producer in the world.”

More than a decade later, Su is the energy director of the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit that uses strategic litigation and grassroots activism to advance energy justice. During her time there, she has worked on a campaign to ban utility shutoffs in communities of color and has won an executive order to manufacture heat pumps for disenfranchised communities. More recently, her team has been urging FEMA to better prepare for the climate emergency, including legally petitioning the agency to recognize extreme heat and wildfire smoke as natural disasters.

But beyond the individual campaigns and lawsuits, Su said she is most proud of the work she and her team have done to shift the politics around energy justice on a global level. Those kinds of wins are “harder to see — but you saw them, for example, when the U.S. did not block and actually supported the fossil fuel phase-down language [at COP28],” she said. “That was actually big.”

It’s cliché to say someone wrote the book on a subject — but in Jennifer Wilcox’s case, it’s true. In 2012, four years after she started teaching a course on carbon capture, she wrote the world’s first textbook on it. Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, has long been controversial, often seen as a distraction or a crutch for fossil fuel companies. But today, it is also widely understood that carbon capture is necessary to keep global temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius. Wilcox is at the forefront of figuring out how that happens.

She spent the last 3.5 years at the Department of Energy, leading the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management — previously just the Office of Fossil Energy. Before she arrived, it focused on studying the most efficient ways of producing and using coal, oil, and natural gas. Wilcox led a turnaround that saw the office shift to curbing the pollution those fuels generate. “It’s the most impactful work of my entire career,” she said. “Dollars [are] going out the door to spaces that we didn’t have dollars for before.”

Since her arrival, the DOE has invested well over $1 billion in carbon capture research and related programs. That money is not without its controversies — CCS technologies are still in early stages — but Wilcox sees the opportunity in funding technologies with potential for significant carbon reduction. She’s also directed funding to clean hydrogen and methane mitigation.

After the stint in government, Wilcox is back doing what she loves most: teaching. As a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, she’s developing new courses focusing on the barriers — financial, technical, or social — to deploying clean energy technology. “It’s another chapter that allows me to take everything I’ve learned and share it to the next set of people who might go and do what I just got to do,” she said.