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Communities that have long borne the brunt of vehicle pollution are one step closer to breathing cleaner air after the Environmental Protection Agency finalized stricter emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles on Tuesday.
The agency’s new rule, part of its larger Clean Trucks Plan, is the first time pollution standards for semi trucks, delivery trucks, and buses have been updated in more than 20 years. It will go into effect when 2027 vehicle models are made available for purchase.
Although heavy-duty vehicles represent less than 5 percent of vehicles on the nation’s roads, they are major emitters of nitrogen oxides, a group of polluting gases that play a significant role in the formation of smog. In high concentrations, nitrogen oxides are known to contribute to heart disease, allergies, asthma, and other lung diseases.
The EPA’s rule will for the first time require manufacturers to adopt newer technology that reduces pollution from trucks when they are idle, driving at low speeds, or navigating stop-and-go traffic. By 2045, the agency estimates that heavy-duty vehicle nitrogen dioxide emissions will decrease by 48 percent as a result of the rule. The regulation is also expected to prevent up to 2,900 deaths by 2045.
Low-income people of color are more likely to live and work in neighborhoods close to major highways and roads, shipping corridors, and areas with large numbers of factories and warehouses — places where heavy-duty trucks create the most pollution. That’s because of the legacy of racist redlining and zoning laws that left many Black and brown families with few other housing options. The construction of the nation’s interstate highway system also targeted neighborhoods where communities of color were concentrated. And in some cities, bans on trucks on certain highways simply pushed them into already-burdened neighborhoods.
“These communities have waited decades for action,” Katherine García, the director of the Sierra Club’s clean transportation campaign, told Grist.
But in recent years, in spite of overall stricter emissions standards for personal vehicles, communities that have fought for years for cleaner, more breathable air have faced setbacks. The rise in global e-commerce — exemplified by online giants like Amazon — has led to an explosion in warehouses, and their attendant delivery trucks, across the country. These “logistics hubs,” designed to accommodate constant consumer demand, frequently end up in areas with loose zoning regulations, cheap land, and a high proportion of low-income people of color living nearby.
California’s Inland Empire, east of Los Angeles, is the home to the nation’s largest concentration of warehouses. The region is also infamous for having the nation’s worst ozone and particle pollution. Residents and advocates here have drawn a link between consumer demand for goods and the hundreds, if not thousands, of trucks that travel their roads on a daily basis. These trucks end up driving past and idling by schools, parks, and homes, exposing residents to more air pollution. Earlier this year, a cohort of the region’s cities extended moratoriums on warehouse construction to take time to assess the purported economic benefits and the very real environmental impacts of these developments.
“We need systemic change, and we need to just clean up these trucks, and we have the solutions,” Melody Reis, the senior legislative manager at Moms Clean Air Force, a national organization that advocates for cleaner air, told Grist.
“Inaction is injustice for these communities,” said Reis, “and this rule should make a tremendous amount of difference.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The US has a new pollution rule for heavy-duty trucks for the first time in 2 decades on Dec 22, 2022.
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In the face of continued legal action from states across the country, 3M, a Fortune 500 manufacturing company, will discontinue the use of “forever chemicals” by 2025.
3M makes Scotchgard and other water-repellent products which contain a class of chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, that do not break down in the environment. PFAS has been found in nearly every state in the country and in everything from polar bears to fast food wrappers. Research has shown a link between these chemicals and public health concerns such as high blood pressure in mid-life women, stunted developmental growth, infertility, as well as kidney, liver, and testicular cancers.
In a statement, the St.Paul-based company said the decision comes on the heels of an “evolving external landscape,” which includes increased regulatory pressures. In the past year, the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, released a PFAS Strategic Roadmap, which plans to create new policies to protect public health and the environment while holding polluters accountable. In addition to the increased federal pressure, 3M has been the target of various lawsuits directed at PFAS manufacturers.
California announced a lawsuit in November that alleges 3M, DuPont, and other PFAS producers have caused far-reaching damage to public health and the environment by dealing in products laced with “forever chemicals.” The lawsuit is similar to a dozen others filed in states across the country. While the lawsuits are mounting, 3M’s awareness of their production problem has been festering for decades.
As early as the 1970s, the manufacturing company knew that PFAS was accumulating in human bloodstreams. According to The Intercept, 3M was sued by its home state of Minnesota in 2010 and settled the suit for $850 million, which lead to a mountain of internal documents, memos, and research to be released by the state’s Attorney General’s Office, showing exactly what the company knew about the harm of the products it produced.
Minnesotans are still grappling with the potential health effects of PFAS, which has had devastating effects on the area’s youth. According to the Minnesota Reformer, a study of children who died between 2003 and 2015 in Oakdale, a Twin Cities suburb, found that a child who died there was 171% more likely to have had cancer than a child who died in the surrounding area. The state of Minnesota alleges that PFAS made its way into the area’s groundwater after decades of 3M discarding PFAS-contaminated waste products in unlined dump sites.
The EPA announced in November that PFAS pollution from 3M had caused an “imminent and substantial endangerment” of the drinking water for nearly 300,000 people in the Quad Cities region of Illinois and Iowa and ordered an investigation into 3M’s role in the pollution.
In 2000, 3M pledged to stop the use of two specific strains of PFAS chemicals in their production process, but the company argued, in its recent announcement, that the continued use of PFAS was “critical” to make products necessary for modern life, such as medical technology, phones, and automobiles. Legal experts estimate future litigation could cost the company upwards of $30 billion.
In the wake of the announcement, environmental groups say the decision is long overdue and hope that the company is still responsible for decades of inaction and harm to the public.
“This is a big win for public health and the environment,” Mike Schade, a program director for the nonprofit Toxic-Free Future, told Grist. “3M historically has been one of the biggest PFAS polluters not only here in the US but globally, and for decades they have proceed and released massive amounts of PFAS that have contaminated communities, water supplies, fish and wildlife, all across the planet”
Schade said that this decision is part of a growing trend of major corporations abandoning PFAS in their manufacturing process. While the manufacturers are looking at a PFAS-free future, he noted that downstream businesses, like clothing companies that still trade in these chemicals, should stop the trail of toxic pollution. He said it’s likely that more companies will be looking for PFAS alternatives and the EPA and industry regulators should remain vigilant that the chemicals these companies replace PFAS with aren’t bound to create the same harms already documented by the forever chemicals.
“In the years going forward, we’re going to be seeing hundreds of communities that have to clean up toxic chemicals, “ Schade said, “and 3M must be held financially liable for that pollution.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline After years of pressure, 3M will stop making ‘forever chemicals’ on Dec 21, 2022.
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With every year that greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, the climate crisis deepens — as does the threat it poses to life on Earth. But that increasing urgency isn’t reflected in many of the U.S.’s undergraduate biology textbooks.
According to a new paper published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE, climate change coverage in college biology textbooks has failed to keep pace with our scientific understanding of the issue or its mounting importance for every living organism on the planet, from single-celled algae to blue whales. Although today’s textbooks contain more sentences on climate change than those from the 1970s, these sentences offer fewer solutions and have been pushed toward the back of the book — where they are likely to be skipped over.
“Why are we still ignoring this issue?” asked Jennifer Landin, a teaching associate professor at North Carolina State University and an author of the paper.
Landin and a coauthor looked at 57 of the most widely used undergraduate biology textbooks published between 1970 and 2019. They analyzed each book’s climate change coverage for length and content — the fraction of sentences used to describe the physical processes of climate change, its impacts on the world’s ecosystems, and ways to address it. They also looked at the textbooks’ changing use of charts and figures.
The good news, Landin said, was that climate coverage has increased since the 1970s and ‘80s, when college biology textbooks only dedicated about 11 sentences to the issue. By the 2000s, textbooks were covering climate change with a median of 51 sentences.
However, this number dropped in the 2010s to 45 sentences — “basically two pages of a Harry Potter paperback,” Landin said. This means most of the college biology textbooks published in the past decade have actually shortened their climate coverage since the 2000s, despite a more than three-fold increase in the number of scientific articles published on climate change during that time.
Biology textbook writers also seem to be pushing climate change coverage further toward the back of their books. They were already leaving it for the last 15 percent of pages in the 1970s, but according to the new study, by the 2010s climate coverage had been relegated to the last 3 percent of pages. This fits a long-term trend where publishers stick controversial topics like evolution toward the back of their textbooks. It’s significant, Landin said, because research suggests most professors progress chronologically through their textbooks — so anything at the end may be glossed over or skipped altogether.
Rabiya Ansari, who coauthored the study, with stacks of the biology textbooks she analyzed.
Courtesy of Jennifer Landin
Joseph Henderson, an associate professor of environment and society at Paul Smith’s College who wasn’t involved in the research, said the study was interesting but that textbooks are only one piece of the education puzzle. “They could be doing a better job with biology textbooks,” he said, but it’s important to also think about whether and how teachers are actually using them.
“This paper and textbooks are a representation of the broader problem,” Henderson explained, “which is that education has been really slow on the uptake in terms of climate education,” especially when it comes to anything that could be perceived as political. Landin’s paper notes that not one of the textbooks published since 1970 mentioned several politically sensitive but high-impact individual or local actions to address climate change, such as changing one’s diet or building more energy-efficient housing. If individual solutions were mentioned at all, they mostly described relatively ineffective behaviors like recycling and turning off lights.
Large-scale intergovernmental agreements like the 1997 Kyoto Protocol — in which more than 150 countries committed to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions — got more coverage than individual actions in textbooks across the decades. Henderson called this a good thing, since the sphere of international policy is where the farthest-reaching changes can be made. But students will likely need an education in other fields like political science and history to better understand those agreements and learn how to push for more ambitious ones. “Climate change education has to be interdisciplinary,” Henderson said.
One beacon from Landin’s research came from her figure analysis. She found that, between the 1990s and 2010s, climate-related data visualizations more than doubled, expanding beyond charts that show rising CO2 levels to also include photographic evidence of glacier melt and maps of species migrations.
This is the kind of progress Landin would like to see more of. She wants textbook editors to expand not just the data visualizations, but also the length of textbooks’ climate chapters. Publishers could put climate coverage earlier in textbooks, she suggested, and help students draw connections across all biology topics — like cellular anatomy, by showing how plants’ chloroplasts pull planet-warming carbon out of the atmosphere. And expanding high-impact solutions content could inspire change while combating young people’s climate anxiety.
“We’re seeing all these problems but we’re not given clear actions to take power over them,” Landin said. “There are clear and well-understood solutions that we simply need to educate young people about.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Study: Biology textbooks aren’t keeping up with climate science on Dec 21, 2022.
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Inflation dominated news headlines and American psyches in 2022. Overall, consumer prices jumped an average 7.1 percent this year, with the cost of just about everything going up, from cars to coffee and gas to groceries. The trend triggered a bitter midterm election campaign, prompted a series of aggressive interest-rate hikes from the Federal Reserve, and fears about an impending recession.
The causes were numerous, from the war in Ukraine to the post-pandemic economic recovery. But in many sectors, the specter of climate change was also lurking behind these higher costs. Extreme swings in temperature and precipitation caused shortages and soaring prices for essential utilities like electricity, heat, and water. A series of catastrophic weather disasters scrambled the supply chains for vegetables and staple grains.
Many of us tend to think that we’re still immune to the direct effects of the climate crisis, but make no mistake — those effects are already here, and they’re hitting our wallets. Here is a look at some of the ways warming came back to bite us at the cash register in 2022.
Grocery bills
Food prices rose about 10 percent this year, one of the highest rates in decades. The surge in grocery bills has been spurred by pandemic supply chain issues and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but climate change played a bigger role than many people realize. Searing heat and other extreme weather hurt crops and livestock around the globe, driving up food costs in a phenomenon known as “heatflation.”
This summer, an unprecedented heat wave in China ruined the corn and soy crops used to feed pigs, sending the cost of pork, the country’s staple meat, soaring. Spain and Italy experienced a stretch of 100-degree temperatures and drought conditions that slashed olive harvests; by November, the price of extra-virgin olive oil in Spain, the world’s largest olive oil producer, had risen 45 percent compared to the previous year. Hurricanes hurt Florida’s citrus crop and snapped Puerto Rico’s plantain trees in half; the Western U.S. baked in a drought that threatens to increase food prices for the years to come.
It’s not just anecdotes: One analysis of seasonal temperatures and price indicators in 48 countries found that hot summers had “by far the largest and longest-lasting impact” on food prices, an effect that lasted nearly a year. Experts warn that flooding, drought, wildfires, and other climate-enhanced disasters will continue to leave shoppers paying a premium in the years ahead.
Water bills
Delivering water to homes and businesses is a high-cost operation. Municipalities and utilities have to pump the water from a river or reservoir, treat it so it’s safe to drink, and send it through hundreds of miles of pipes and canals. They also have to keep repairing and upgrading all that infrastructure year after year. The cost of maintaining this delivery system stays more or less the same, but the amount of money these groups earn back depends on how much water they deliver to customers.
Dry land is exposed on the banks of Lake Oroville, the second-largest reservoir in California that provides drinking water to more than 25 million people, in 2021.
PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images
In dry years like this one, utilities have to withdraw less water from dwindling reservoirs, which means they have less to sell, and have to raise prices to make up the difference. That’s currently happening in California, where many Central Valley residents are struggling to afford water even as local wells go dry; around 12 percent of state residents are behind on their water bills, owing as much as $1 billion in payments. As municipal supplies fell this year, it meant there was also less excess water available for trading on agricultural spot markets, causing prices to soar for farmers: The Nasdaq Veles California Water index rose by around 56 percent between January and June of this year, reaching an all-time high.
Other climate-driven extreme weather has impacted water prices in other ways. In wetter areas, extreme precipitation events caused unprecedented damage to utility infrastructure and forced costly repairs – a burden most often passed down to ratepayers. And in agricultural areas around the Great Lakes, excessive heat is increasingly causing fertilizer-laden water bodies to form harmful algae blooms. According to an analysis earlier this year, for instance, the cost of treating water in Toledo, Ohio, to eradicate this bacteria is now nearly $20 per resident per year — a cost incorporated into consumers’ water bills.
Insurance premiums
We rely on home insurance to help us recover after a disaster, but policies are getting more expensive and harder to obtain as floods, fires, and hurricanes intensify. These changes were acutely felt this past year. According to Policygenius, an insurance marketplace, 90 percent of U.S. homeowners saw their premiums increase from May 2021 to May 2022, with an average jump of $134 annually.
Homeowners in flood-prone areas all over the country saw huge price hikes in recent months. The National Flood Insurance Program, or NFIP, which insures more than 5 million properties, is in the process of rolling out a new pricing system, raising rates in many coastal areas to more accurately reflect existing flood risk. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the federal group that administers the NFIP, estimated that some 66 percent of policyholders would see their premiums jump by up to $10 per month under the new risk scale, 7 percent by up to $20 per month, and 4 percent more than $20. The hikes have been so severe that hundreds of thousands of homeowners have dropped their NFIP policies altogether.
A house flooded by water due to Hurricane Ian at Stillwright Point in Key Largo, Florida, September 29, 2022.
Daniel A. Varela/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Also this year, half a dozen insurers in Florida collapsed after their financial backers grew too concerned about hurricane risk; the state is now seeing the consequences of this breakdown, with price hikes in the wake of Hurricane Ian. On the opposite coast, several national insurance companies tried dropping customers in fire-risky areas of California to reduce their exposure to future disasters. As these insurers disappear, coverage gets more expensive, putting homeowners in a bind: They must either pay skyrocketing prices or drop their policies and live without a safety net.
Utility bills
Climate change is impacting the frequency and severity of heat and cold spells in different parts of the United States – and in 2022, these periods of extremes made it harder for people to afford their home heating and cooling costs. One in six U.S. households are currently behind on their utility bills.
Let’s start in the winter: Around 90 percent of U.S. households use either electricity or natural gas as their main source of heat. This past January, average household electricity rates soared by 8 percent, the highest increase in over a decade. Parts of the country experienced severe cold that month as warming temperatures in the Arctic destabilized the polar jet stream, sending frigid air southward. This winter, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that average household heating costs for natural gas will increase by 28 percent, in part due to forecasted colder-than-average temperatures.
This past summer, millions of Americans also dealt with stretches of extreme heat, which strained electric grids and caused household energy and air conditioning bills to skyrocket. The National Energy Assistance Directors Association estimated that Americans’ electric bills increased 20 percent due to the heat waves, jumping to an average $540.
Low-income families of color, both in urban and rural settings, are being hit the hardest. Black, Latino, and Indigenous households are more likely than white households to have their power cut off due to unpaid utility bills. “You have to choose between having a normal holiday season or maybe paying this bill or that bill. It’s all about survival,” said Linnea Jackson, General Manager of the Hoopa Valley Tribe’s Public Utilities District in Northern California. “Those increased costs are really impacting tribal communities.”
Jackson says that in addition to higher energy costs from summers and winters with periods of hotter highs and lower lows, also known as weather whiplash, climate-driven disasters like wildfires, drought, and powerful storms all disrupt service and drive up costs. “It’s only getting worse. People are struggling to come up with the cost to afford basic electricity,” Jackson said.
Kirstie Allemand arranges cardboard above an air conditioning unit in her window during soaring temperatures on July 28, 2022 in Ellensburg, Washington.
David Ryder/Getty Images
In Bethel, Alaska, Sophie Swope, a Yup’ik environmental activist, says that thawing permafrost is causing houses to shift and crack, forcing people to spend more money on heating. Higher fuel costs also weigh heavily on communities like Swope’s, where many essential supplies have to be shipped in. “Everything is just so much more expensive,” Swope said.
Electricity prices
High energy bills this year weren’t just a result of heat waves and cold fronts. The cost of power itself spiked all over the country. That’s in large part due to Russia’s war in Ukraine, which drove a scarcity in natural gas supply around the world and upped the cost of producing electricity from power plants. The Energy Information Administration estimates that residential customers paid 8 percent more for electricity, on average, than in 2021.
The war may be the primary cause, but some parts of the country also saw rate hikes due to climate-related extreme events like storms, drought, and wildfires. In June, 1 million customers in Louisiana saw fees added to their bills, as much as $25 for some households, to help the electric utility Entergy recover costs related to storm damage from hurricanes Laura, Delta, Zeta, and Ida, as well as Winter Storm Uri in February 2021.
In California, customers of the largest utility in the state, Pacific Gas & Electric, or PG&E, started the year off with a rate increase that was driven in part by the costs of wildfire prevention. It didn’t end there. Just two months later, PG&E bumped its rates again to cover the rising cost of natural gas. The company said it had eaten up a lot of its natural gas supply the previous summer when the drought was limiting hydropower output, and had to buy more.
The Western Area Power Administration, a federal agency that sells power from government-owned hydropower dams to utilities throughout the West, told Grist that reduced hydropower generation this year due to the megadrought put “upward pressure on power rates in some pockets of the West.”
Jake Bittle, Kate Yoder, Joseph Lee, Brett Marsh, and Emily Pontecorvo contributed to this story.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 5 ways climate change made life more expensive in 2022 on Dec 21, 2022.
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If you want to see some examples of actual Indigenous futuristic filmmaking, may I suggest you look somewhere besides James Cameron?
There’s the Cree-Metis’ filmmaker Danis Goulet’s recent Night Raiders or the late Mi’kmaw filmmaker Jeff Barnaby’s extremely timely last film, Blood Quantum, released for streaming near the beginning of the COVID pandemic.
Both of those films look at and reframe Indigenous history through an Indigenous perspective: boarding school trauma in the case of Night Raiders and the unique relationship Indigenous people have with foreign disease (think smallpox) in the case of Blood Quantum. Both films speak to issues that affect and have affected Indian Country.
If you want to see a white man’s version of an Indigenous futurism film, however, then the local multiplex showing Avatar: The Way of Water is the way to go.
That said, the plot of what some call Avatar 2 is simple enough: the earth is dying, humans need resources, and this requires a complete takeover of the planet Pandora, which also requires the “taming” of the Indigenous inhabitants, the Na’vi.
Former Avatar and now transformed into a full Na’vi, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and family are driven out of their homelands by Sully’s former military colleague Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who’s also gone full Na’vi and is set on revenge. Sully is intent on protecting his family from further danger. Why is he running? Is it white guilt? He claims it’s to protect his Indigenous clan, yet his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) wants to fight.
The Sully family fly far out to sea where they meet Tonowari (Cliff Curtis), the chief of the Māori-inspired Metkayina clan. The Metkayina are slow to accept them in their territories (the Sullys can’t swim well and their tails are too small) yet eventually take the Sullys in as one of their own and in time will join together in the fight against the approaching earth intruders, the Sky People.
Cameron’s latest is a curious mixture of surface Indigeneity signified from a white man’s perspective: long braids and dreadlocks attached to foreign bodies, the bodies laden with “exotic” ta moko-style tattoos. Ten-feet-tall men and women with large eyes and elfin ears are set in exotic alien locales that bring to mind fantasy artist Frank Frazetta or certain Lakota friends I’ve met. On top of all this is the connection these beings, the Na’vi, have with respect to the land and its inhabitants. It’s fantasy Indigeneity.
It’s hard not to be skeptical of Cameron’s grasp of the Indigenous material he’s appropriating here. Sure, you can make up anything you want in a fantastical tale and even have your left-leaning cake too. There are no rules to filmmaking or art in general, and if you have the funding, the world is your oyster. One can create a world where we can see white men’s myopia in regard to the environment; a story of materialism and colonialism where the consequences of a hunger and thirst for money and resources are displayed from beginning to end. Where’s the fault in that?
The fault is that James Cameron can travel the world, do the “research,” hire Indigenous film legends like Wes Studi (Cherokee) in the first Avatar movie and Cliff Curtis (Maori) and Jermaine Clement (Maori) in Avatar 2, but he can’t escape who he is: a filmmaker who told the Guardian in 2010 that his inspiration in making the first Avatar film was based on the Lakota Sioux.
“I couldn’t help but think that if they [the Lakota Sioux] had had a time-window and they could see the future … and they could see their kids committing suicide at the highest suicide rates in the nation … because they were hopeless and they were a dead-end society — which is what is happening now — they would have fought a lot harder.”
Cameron’s comments are tone-deaf, condescending, and not the kind of ally I want or need to help tell Indigenous stories. It’s one thing to read and research about a culture; it’s quite another to be of it. Perhaps that’s why there’s a boycott of the film currently underway by many Indigenous groups, one of which is led by Asdzáá Tłʼéé honaaʼéí, a Navajo artist and co-chair of Indigenous Pride Los Angeles.
The arresting animation includes this creature in Avatar: The Way of Water.
20th Century Studios
The animation in Avatar: The Way of Water is visually stunning. The animals in particular — I’ll call them sea beasts and air beasts — are very lifelike, with shadows and texture, and many have souls and thoughts of their own and communicate these with the Na’vi. The concept (much like the film) walks a fine line between being corny and magical, and you just have to go with the concept, should you buy into it. One thinks if you paid the ticket to be in the theater, you’re ready to take the ride. I viewed the film as a ride, once in a 3D IMAX theater and once in a regular theater. As someone with glasses, I have to say that I think I enjoyed the film better without the 3D accouterment (also there’s less danger of smearing popcorn butter on your clunky 3D glasses).
The thesis of the film, in the midst of the various subplots, exotic character names, and Pandora versions of whales and sharks and fascinating technology, seems to be: family first. In this case it’s the Sully family fighting against the elements and their enemies to persevere on the frontier.
Sully (a Marine in his former human life) and his sons communicate to each other in military speak and it’s a bit cringey; his sons reply with “yes sir” to their father not as a sign of respect but because that’s just the way they relate to each other; they are sons in their father’s army. It’s a Sully family quirk. Is this wrong? Not necessarily, but it’s certainly jarring to hear in a family supposedly influenced by Indigenous culture.
And while not totally off topic, the poor white kid the Sully family has adopted, Spider (kind of a mix of the feral kid in Mad Max and gas station-era Justin Bieber), is often forgotten or left low on the priority list of the family. The mother practically despises him and he knows it. The lack of respect the Sully clan have for their human adoptee becomes comical as the movie progresses.
At 3 hours and 10 minutes, the film needs a more aggressive editor. Though the time in Metkayina territories provides a nice backstory, we probably don’t need to spend as much time exploring this new Na’vi version of Maoriland. I was intrigued by the updated western movie influences: trains are derailed by Comanche, er, I mean Na’vi, and pillaged for modern weaponry, the Sky people view the Na’vi as hindrances to “progress,” the Sully family is seen as dirty “half-breeds,” half sky people, half Na’vi.
A film like this takes a lot of money to make, and as such is a technological marvel. Still, I’m left wondering, what if a producer just gave a Maori-inspired project like this to an actual Indigenous filmmaker, perhaps an actual Māori filmmaker like Taika Waititi, and we had an actual Indigenous filmmaker tell the story instead of a story told through the lens of a white guy updating colonial western movie tropes? What would that look like? And why are we watching an Indigenous story again through a white man’s (3D) lens? Well, the obvious answer is James Cameron has the money to make it. But when do Indigenous people get to make something like this?
Or maybe the better question is: Is this the type of thing Indigenous people would even want to make?
There are plenty of real-life issues that affect Indigenous people in 2022. The upcoming Supreme Court ICWA decision regarding whether Indigenous adoptees get to stay with Indigenous families or not comes to mind. We have water issues (which this film ironically has nothing to do with), of course colonialism is ever-present and the fight for resources is always in play, but do we need a white guy to dress these issues up in the world of fantasy where 10-foot-tall aliens fight “hard enough” to save the day to prove that we aren’t after all a “dead-end society”? Perhaps Indigenous futurism should be left in the hands of actual Indigenous filmmakers who know and can tell these stories?
When the first Avatar came out in 2009, I actually enjoyed it. The technology was shiny and new, there were less Indigenous stories on film, perhaps I even asked less of the type of Indigeneity I saw on the screen; times have changed. In 2022 we had three Indigenous-led TV shows in the United States: Rutherford Falls, Reservation Dogs, and Dark Winds. Reservation Dogs alone had at least half a dozen Indigenous directors in its ranks. The time has come for Indigenous directors to re-make these westerns and continue making our own Indigenous futurism films in our own image, to flip the script, tease the tropes, put Indian before Cowboy. We have enough proven talent at this point and don’t need out-of-touch, privileged directors like James Cameron to appropriate Indigenous culture for his stories. We can tell our own stories. We tell them better.
Jason Asenap is a Comanche and Muscogee Creek writer, critic, and filmmaker based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Avatar: The Way of Water or how not to make Indigenous futurist movies on Dec 20, 2022.
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You are familiar, I’m sure, with the institution of the gift shop: a business that exists entirely to sell useless treats and temptations, an ode to capitalistic superfluousness. During the weekend before Hanukkah, I found myself in such a place, driven into a state of dissociation by twee mugs and balsam-scented candles. This was how I ended up purchasing a felt pocket of catnip in the shape of a pierogi for my brother’s cat, because the package I was sending to his family in California just felt incomplete without a few extra trinkets.
Normally, I am a woman who is familiar — intellectually, professionally, emotionally — with the many problems brought about by rampant holiday shopping. I know that both the copious buying and receiving of presents often constitutes a source of stress for all parties involved, that shiny wrapping paper and ribbon are a landfill nightmare, that the manufacturing and shipping of billions of goods for a few days’ celebration is both a burden on human workers and the polluted atmosphere. Indeed: the entire contemporary ideal of winter holidays is largely perpetuated by corporations to profit off of manufactured emotions.
One obvious solution that evades most of these environmental and societal ills while still showering love and generosity upon your loved ones is to embrace gifts not bought new: homemade, secondhand, even — gasp! — regifted. It is a technique I personally strive to espouse. In the weeks leading up to Hanukkah, I took significant time and care this year to make personalized drawings in vintage frames for my family members, at my dining room table. (They were nice! I promise.)
And yet I still felt the need to buy a few small things, simply to show that I was also willing to spend money on my loved ones — This in spite of being well aware that the gratuitous “just because” trinkets are among the worst offenders of gift-giving, as useless as they are unwanted.
What is this force that compels me and millions of others to partake in the service of one very specific holiday ideal: the heap of shiny new presents, all wrapped up with a bow? Is it the consequence of capitalism, of holiday rom-coms, of deeply ingrained relationship dynamics? And more importantly, is it an ideal simply too powerful to subvert?
According to data from the National Retail Federation, a trade organization whose members range from department stores to multi-level marketing operations, 2021 holiday season spending grew by 13.5 percent compared to the previous year, a greater increase than any in the past 20 years. This year, gift spending is expected to grow by another 6 to 8 percent, even in light of the highest inflation rates in 40 years.
The financial services company Bankrate surveyed consumers on how they would stretch their holiday budgets due to inflation. The most popular response was implementing coupons, discounts, and sales (41 percent), closely followed by simply buying fewer gifts (40 percent). The least popular answers were making handmade gifts and buying secondhand items, reported by only 14 and 11 percent respectively.
The reluctance to go with secondhand gifts boils down to how givers think used items will be received, said Julian Givi, a marketing professor at West Virginia University. His research suggests that fear is largely unfounded, driven in no small part by relentless messaging by retailers. “When it comes to used products, recipients are more open to them than givers anticipate,” he said.
As it turns out, the person that gives the gift cares much more about how much it cost than the recipient, contrary to the assumption of Drake’s entire oeuvre. In fact, Givi says that “sentimental” gifts — family heirlooms, handmade gifts, even a simple framed photograph — are almost guaranteed to provide more happiness than a $20 tchotchke thrown into a Target cart in a panic.
Even knowing that from his own research, Givi admitted that he — much like myself! — usually succumbs to the pressure to spend a certain amount on new gifts every year. It’s a sort of prisoner’s dilemma of presents: If everyone else in the family gives an expensive gift, how will I look?
An influential anthropological theory published in 1925 by the sociologist Marcel Mauss presents the practice of gift exchange as the foundation of all peaceful relationships among both individuals and communities. On one hand, it’s a nice idea that acts as a counterpoint to a society dependent on capitalistic commerce; on the other, that’s quite a bit of interpersonal pressure come December.
But Mauss’ theory is grounded in the idea that there is no such thing as a selfless gift, as every gift is given in expectation of some form of equivalent reciprocation. This competitive element to gift giving – especially the pressure at the holidays to be the most thoughtful, the most generous, the most caring – drives us to spend, even when we don’t want or have to. After all, there’s no simple scale to measure sentimental value or joy or any other merit a gift might have. Why not let currency do the job instead?
But to make matters even more fraught, the factors guiding contemporary gift giving aren’t just about money. There is also the expectation — particularly in romantic relationships — that the gift in question carry emotional significance. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a rather harsh message for those who simply purchase their gifts in one 1844 essay:
The only gift is a portion of thyself … Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing … But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy me something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith’s.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essays: Second Series, 1844
Emerson’s musings are a full-throated endorsement of the handmade present, to be sure — but to make such a thing requires significant spare time at the very least. If the two acceptable options to show your great affection for another person are extraordinary effort or extraordinary expenditure, I would guess that most people today will opt for the expenditure, since time is an increasingly precious resource in modern life.
But what would it look like if the monetary or sentimental value of a gift weren’t a proxy for the giver’s own self worth, a way of establishing their place relative to others in a family, community, or society? This is part of the concept behind the Buy Nothing community, in which people in neighborhoods or small regional groups use social media to offer up or ask for goods. In these hyperlocal gift economies, nothing on offer is treated as more valuable than anything else. A diamond ring from a bad relationship should not be seen as worth more than a set of recycled baby food jars. (These are real examples.)
“You have a set of rules in a sharing economy, where you make it abundantly clear that every single gift has the same value,” says Liesl Clark, co-founder of the Buy Nothing Project. “We have had to work really hard at this, working at a flat economy where the true value is the connection between the people, and the wealth is the connections forged between proximal neighbors.”
There are obvious challenges to applying these rules alongside a larger society in which diamond rings and baby food jars do have very different values. But one thing that Clark emphasizes is that the benefits associated with gifts exchanged via Buy Nothing groups often have little to do with those items’ worth in a commerce-based economy. A large pile of firewood from a giver’s property delivered right before a snowstorm cuts all the power to the recipient’s house quickly becomes the most precious thing in the world to that person, but it might have retailed for $19.99 at Kroger.
To that end, we can reread Emerson’s quote with a takeaway other than “Ralph doesn’t want your Gift Cards.” The poet’s words, the miner’s gem, and the seamstress’s handkerchief would all be priced very differently in a store, but they represent the same value: a piece of oneself, given with love.
Allow me, then, to propose a sort of progressive theory of gift-giving: Try not to focus on what you feel you should give. Above all else, a recipient wants to feel loved and cared for. They do not want to feel burdened or indebted. If these principles — and not an arbitrary sense of competition or obligation — guide one’s choices, I am confident that much of the stress of holiday presents will melt like snow on a lit windowpane.
As for the catnip pierogi — well, the cat loved it. But not significantly more than she loved the wrapping paper and ribbon that came with it.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The case for spending less money on holiday gifts on Dec 20, 2022.
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Code red, glacier blood, megadrought: The defining words of 2021
Anthropause, ghost flights, spillover: Only a pandemic could bring words like these
Birth strike, flygskam, Pyrocene: And we thought things couldn’t get worse
Firenado, hothouse, smokestorm: The year fires went wild
Hotumn, meatmares, ecoanxiety: Oh, how young we all were then
It was a sunny morning in July when my editor sent me a hot tip. An unprecedented heat wave in China was ruining the corn and soy crops used to feed pigs, sending the price of pork soaring. And at the same time, hot and dry conditions were sweeping Europe, expected to erase a third of the seasonal harvest of rice, corn, and animal feed in Italy alone.
There was a pattern emerging. A month earlier, the United States had baked in searing temperatures that killed thousands of cattle in Kansas. Everyone was worrying about inflation with grocery bills and energy costs rising. And it looked like the record-breaking heat had been playing a larger role in driving up prices than many people realized. In the course of writing an article that linked these events together, a word was born: heatflation.
As the world overheats, new words and phrases turn up all the time, and old ones gain new meanings. Companies invent terms to sound greener, politicians try to come up with the smartest name for a climate bill, and activists bring brand-new words to life by devising fresh tactics to bring attention to their cause (like throwing soup at famous paintings).
There was so much going on in 2022, the language had some serious catching up to do. This summer, heavy rainfall submerged a third of Pakistan with deadly flooding. China endured a heat wave that was more intense, longer-lasting, and spread over a wider area than any in recent history. Yet the year also held positive developments: In August, Congress passed landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Joe Biden promptly signed into law.
These shifting circumstances shape not only the physical world but also the way we talk about it. Every year, dictionary editors select a word that they think encapsulates the year’s spirit. This time around, Merriam-Webster picked “gaslighting,” Collins Dictionary selected “permacrisis,” and Oxford Languages went with “goblin mode.” Here are Grist’s 10 picks for the words of year, the terms and phrases that best captured the zeitgeist of our fast-changing planet in 2022.
Summer has transformed into ‘danger season,’ scientists warn. Hurricanes, heat, fires, smoke, drought: Is it time to stop sugar-coating summer?
Danger season
The period of the year from May to October plagued with wildfires, hurricanes, and heat waves.
Splashing in pools, eating ice cream cones … and evacuating from wildfires? Summer has earned a new, more sinister name: danger season, The phrase, coined by Erika Spanger-Siegfried, an analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, is meant to draw attention to how climate change has supercharged summertime threats. And this summer was no exception. A “heat dome” over France, Germany, Spain, and Britain — which scientists said would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change — led to an estimated 20,000 deaths. “I just want to say straight-up, frankly, 10, 15 years ago, when we would talk about these things, we didn’t want to scare people,” Rachel Cleetus, a policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Grist earlier this year. “And now we’re scared, we’re terrified, for what we have already unleashed on the world.”
‘Flash droughts’ are Midwest’s next big climate threat: New research shows that dry weather is coming on more quickly than before, with little advance warning.
Flash droughts
Sudden dry spells marked by hot, dry air that sucks the moisture out of plants and soil.
You’ve heard of flash floods, outbursts of heavy rain that appear out of nowhere. It’s time to get accustomed to flash droughts, which can crop up in a matter of a week, parching the landscape with little warning. One descended on much of the Northeast in August, endangering the cranberry harvest in Massachusetts. In Oklahoma, 100-degree days dried out the land in July, sending the entire state into a drought. A study earlier this year found that rapid-onset droughts like these are taking hold faster as the climate warms, making them harder to predict, more devastating, and more damaging. Over the past two decades, for example, flash droughts increased more than 20 percent in the Central United States.
Heat pump
An efficient device that “pumps” heat from one place to another, used for both heating and cooling.
It was a big year for heat pumps, a confusingly named device that cools and heats homes. They’re ultra-efficient, using much less energy than traditional heaters, because they use electricity to move heat instead of creating it. Michael Thomas, a journalist and the founder of Carbon Switch, called them “the most overlooked climate solution.” After Russia invaded Ukraine in January, the European Union scrambled to find a way to lessen its dependence on Russian natural gas, enlisting heat pumps as a crucial tool. The technology is also gaining traction in the United States. Washington became the first state to require new buildings to have all-electric heating. Though installing heat pumps can be expensive, the average homeowner could save almost $1,000 on utility bills each year by switching from a fuel oil furnace, preventing four tons of carbon pollution in the process. And yes, in case you were wondering, the technology does work in the cold.
Heatflation: How sizzling temperatures drive up food prices. As heat waves strike Europe and China, crops are withering.
Heatflation
When hot temperatures send prices soaring.
Climate change is gaining a reputation for driving up prices for all sorts of things. After I coined the word heatflation this summer, the term appeared in The Atlantic, Newsweek, and CBS, then made its way around the world in articles from India, Malaysia, and France. In the middle of harvest season in October, food prices in the United States were 10.9 percent higher compared to the year before — even higher than the overall inflation rate of 7.7 percent. Blazing-hot weather was likely one source of the surge. Last year, an analysis from the European Central Bank examined seasonal temperatures and price indicators in 48 countries and found that hot summers had “by far the largest and longest-lasting impact” on food prices. The changing climate has also been a culprit behind higher lumber prices (with trees getting eaten alive by wildfires and heat-loving bark beetles) and insurance premiums (as lenders retreat from risky, flood-prone areas).
Here’s what’s in the Senate’s $369 billion for climate and energy. The Democrats’ deal with Manchin is a climate landmark that would also boost fossil fuels.
IRA
A confusing acronym for the Inflation Reduction Act.
It’s already used as a stand-in for an individual retirement account and the Irish Republican Army, and this year the acronym was pressed into service for President Joe Biden’s landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act. Democrats chose the name to appeal to voters as rising prices were top of mind (see entry for heatflation). The IRA directs $369 billion toward renewable power and energy-saving measures, such as tax credits to spur clean energy investments, rebates for buying electric vehicles, and grants to reduce pollution in economically disadvantaged communities. It also opens up new lands and waters to oil and gas leases, a bargaining chip to earn the vote of Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. By 2030, the bill’s programs could help the U.S. cut emissions by 40 percent compared to 2005 levels. The question dividing White House officials and energy nerds now: Do you pronounce it by spelling out the letters (I.R.A.) or like the name Ira?
‘Nature-rinsing’: How polluters use the beauty of nature to clean up their image. Ever wonder why ads show SUVs dashing through the forest?
Nature-rinsing
Using natural imagery in advertisements to give the appearance of being environmentally friendly.
Have you ever seen a commercial where an SUV veers offroad, then takes off through the trees, bounding through a beautiful forest? These kinds of advertisements are so common, it’s easy to miss what’s happening: a type of greenwashing recently labeled nature-rinsing. Polluting companies have long used the beauty of nature — images of wild animals, green plants, and lush landscapes — to clean up their reputation. Marketing research shows that such tactics are often successful, with nature-filled ads eliciting pleasant feelings and improving people’s views of the advertiser’s brand.
Now these images seem to be popping up all over the place. According to a working study analyzing nearly 34,000 social media posts from European companies this summer, environment-related visuals appeared in 97 percent of posts from airlines, and well over half of posts from carmakers and oil companies. “I was shocked by the scale of it when we actually started to quantify it,” Geoffrey Supran, a Harvard researcher who coined nature-rinsing in the report, told Grist earlier this year.
Can the world overshoot its climate targets — and then fix it later? Policymakers seem to be banking on it. But irreversible climate impacts could get in the way.
Overshoot
A situation where the world overshoots its climate targets — and then fixes it later.
What’s the difference between the globe warming 1.5 degrees versus 2 degrees C? That half a degree means everything for the existence of small islands and for the well-being of millions of people who would sweat through deadly extreme heat. Unfortunately, we’re all but guaranteed to shoot right past the target of 1.5 degrees C, or 2.7 degrees F. Enter overshoot: a politically popular but scientifically suspect scenario in which the world blows past its climate goals and later brings temperatures back down.
The problem for anyone banking on this turn of events is that some of climate change’s devastating consequences will turn out to be irreversible, as documented in a landmark report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in February. Extinct species will not come back; coral reefs might be permanently lost; ice sheets that melted into the ocean will keep sea levels high. A hotter climate could also set off feedback loops in which damaged forests and thawing permafrost may keep releasing the vast stores of carbon within them. Overshoot hasn’t yet traveled from scientific journals into the vernacular, but it’s sure to come up more often as the mercury continues to rise.
The mental block preventing people from buying electric vehicles A new study found people greatly underestimate how many of their daily tasks an EV could support.
Range anxiety
The worry that your car might die in the middle of a trip.
In 2022, electric vehicles hummed their way into the mainstream . The year kicked off with Super Bowl commercials promoting huge electric SUVs and the long-awaited release of the electric version of the most popular vehicle in America, the Ford F-150 Lightning. But range anxiety might be stopping some people from buying them. In May, a study found that many people in the United States and Germany mistakenly thought that an electric vehicle wouldn’t be able to meet their daily needs. Survey respondents underestimated how many daily tasks an electric vehicle could complete by as much as 30 percent.
The fact is, batteries have been improving for years, and most EVs can now go 200 miles on a full charge, with more than a dozen models getting closer to 300 or 400 miles — like the popular Ford Mustang Mach-E and Tesla Model S. Showing car buyers that these vehicles can easily fulfill most of their activities — if not a road trip to Lake Tahoe — may help speed up the adoption of lower-emissions vehicles. Another thing that could help drivers feel less anxious about getting stranded is a robust network of chargers, which states are getting $5 billion to start building along the Interstate Highway System.
With ‘real zero,’ NextEra pushes back against deceptive carbon offsets Environmental advocates praise the plan and note a few flaws.
Real zero
A corporate goal to eliminate carbon emissions entirely, no accounting tricks allowed.
Like it or not, you’ve probably heard the phrase “net zero” by now. Corporations and governments have been announcing their intentions to go “net zero” for about a decade, pledging to suck up as much carbon as they emit, often by some far-off date. While the idea works, in theory, critics say these pledges can easily get exploited, leading to some creative accounting. In June, the company NextEra — which owns the large electric utility Florida Power & Light and is a big player in renewables and natural gas — pushed back at ambiguous net-zero pledges by coining real zero. The trademarked term means a company would actually eliminate its emissions without the use of carbon offsets or carbon capture. That is, genuinely zero emissions. While the real-zero goal might be laudable, the whole concept of voluntary corporate goals has drawn criticism for their lack of success: A recent study found that 93 percent of large global companies were on track to miss their emissions-cutting targets.
Interest in civil disobedience has reached a mini climate tipping point Non-violent protest for the planet? “Definitely,” say 4.8 percent of Americans in Yale study.
Soup thrower
A protester who launches soup at art in the name of their cause.
What does tomato soup have to do with climate change? It was a question no one needed to ask until October, when activists with the group Just Stop Oil tossed tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s iconic Sunflowers painting, protected by a pane of glass in London’s National Gallery. “Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?” asked Phoebe Plummer, one of the soup throwers. Then, activists also flung mashed potatoes at a Claude Monet painting in Germany. The food-launching tactic led museums to tighten security and sparked vigorous debate over whether using an attention-grabbing tactic was helping or hurting the cause. Either way, activists are increasingly turning to civil disobedience as they become frustrated by the world’s slothlike progress on phasing out fossil fuels. In 2022, new words weren’t enough — the high stakes led to new actions, too.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Heatflation, overshoot, soup throwers: Grist’s picks for words of the year on Dec 19, 2022.
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The second-largest tar sands oil spill in the country — which left a black pockmark on Kansas grasslands a few weeks ago — will be harder to clean compared to past oil spills.
In early December, nearly 14,000 barrels of oil known as diluted bitumen spilled in north-central Kansas, three hours outside of Kansas City, Kansas. The cleanup is still underway, with at least 4,000 barrels now cleared from a waterway known as Mill Creek. But as time goes on, environmentalists and infrastructure experts worry about the oil that will be more difficult to clean.
According to TC Energy ,the Canadian operator of the Keystone Pipeline responsible for the spill, other sections of the pipeline have been restarted at reduced pressure. At the time of the spill, the pipeline was operating at 80 percent of the maximum recommended rate, which is allowed under a 2007 permit granted to the pipeline company by the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA. Normally, crude oil pipelines can’t operate above 72 percent of this rate. To be granted the exception, TC Energy had to “construct the pipeline using higher-grade steel,” according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.
Diluted bitumen, or dilbit, is a natural oil sand found in sand deposits. It’s composed of sand, water, and bitumen, a sticky, black petroleum. According to an Inside Climate News analysis, dilbit is the heaviest of the crude oils used today and 50 to 70 percent of its composition is likely to sink in water, compared to the less than 10 percent of most crude oils. The oil inside the Keystone Pipeline is transported from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada — the globe’s third largest petroleum reserve — to refineries in the Midwest and the Gulf Coast. The leak occurred on a section of the Keystone Pipeline completed in 2011.
“It is troubling to see so many failures and so much oil spilled from any pipeline, but it is especially troubling from such a relatively new pipeline,” Bill Caram, executive director of the nonprofit infrastructure trade organization Pipeline Safety Trust, said in a statement.
According to a report from the National Academy of Sciences, dilbit is harder to clean, coats and adheres to landscapes and animals more than other crude oils, and has a smaller window of opportunity for proper cleanup. This study was commissioned by Congress after the infamous 2010 Kalamazoo, Michigan oil spill, where nearly 42,000 barrels of dilbit spilled into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River from an Enbridge-operated pipeline. This oil spill, which took four years and billions of dollars to clean up while also prompting the evacuation of hundreds of homes, was the worst tar sands oil spill in the nation’s history.
So far, 71 fish and four mammals have been confirmed killed in the Kansas oil spill, with one beaver saved by rescue crews, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA. After the initial spill, TC Energy created two dams to prevent any continued spread and has since been working to remove the tar sands oil from surface water. According to the EPA, no drinking water wells were affected by the spill, but the federal agency and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment have urged people and animals to avoid the contaminated creek.
“We continue to prioritize the safety of people and the environment,” TC Energy said in a statement. “We are working with wildlife assessment crews including state and federal wildlife trustees and have trained professional responders onsite to identify any impacts to wildlife.”
The company has previously paid over $300,000 in fines related to damage caused by the Keystone Pipeline.
The Keystone Pipeline, and its now-defunct offshoot Keystone XL, have sparked battles from local communities and Indigenous people in the nation’s prairie lands since its inception. In 2011, then-Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman urged the federal government to stop the expansion of the pipeline through his state to protect water. When the Keystone XL segment was announced, federal and local law enforcement began to strategize about how to stop Indigenous protests in Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska “by any means.”
The ruptured Kansas segment of the pipeline remains closed during the cleanup process. In a statement, TC Energy said it continues to work with the PHMSA to determine the cause of the ruptured line. President Joseph Biden recently released 2 million barrels of oil from the nation’s strategic reserve to various refineries in hopes of preventing “potential supply disruptions” caused by the spill.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Cleanup is underway for the US’s second-largest tar sands oil spill. Experts say it’ll be harder than past leaks. on Dec 16, 2022.
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When Hurricane Ian hit Central Florida last fall, Milly Santiago already knew what it was like to lose everything to a hurricane, to leave your home, to start over.
For her, that was the outcome of Hurricane Maria, which struck her native Puerto Rico in September 2017, killing thousands of residents and leaving the main island without power for nearly a year.
So in September 2022, nearly five years to the day when Maria tossed her life apart, Santiago was in suburban Orlando, visiting a friend. As torrents of heavy rain battered the roof of her friend’s home, and muddy waters flooded the streets, she realized they were trapped.
And that her life was going to change, again.
“It created such a brutal anxiety in me that I don’t even know how to explain,” she said in Spanish.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, Santiago was one of more than 100,000 Puerto Ricans who left Puerto Rico and relocated to places like Florida, seeking safety, economic opportunities, and a place to rebuild their lives. Only now, with displacement caused by Hurricane Ian, as well as one of the worst housing crises in the country, the stability for Puerto Ricans in hurricane-battered Florida has never felt more at risk. With those like Santiago twice displaced, many are finding their resilience and sense of home tested like never before.
Homes damaged by Hurricane Maria stand in an area without electricity on October 15, 2017 in San Isidro, Puerto Rico.
Mario Tama via Getty Images
Santiago’s life right before Maria was based in Canóvanas, a town on the outskirts of Puerto Rico’s capital of San Juan. There, she lived with her teenage daughter and son. Hurricane Irma visited first, grazing the United States territory in early September and causing widespread blackouts. When Hurricane Maria hit on September 20, it ultimately took the lives of more than 4,000 Puerto Ricans, making it the most devastating tropical storm to ever hit the region. It would take 11 months for power to be fully restored to Puerto Rico’s main island, home to the majority of the territory’s population of just over 3 million.
Santiago lost her business as a childcare provider in the wake of the devastation to Puerto Rico’s economy and infrastructure. She decided she had no other option but to leave. By mid-October of that year, Santiago, with her children — and their father —relocated to metro Orlando.
It took her years to adjust to her new life. And then Ian happened.
“It was already a nightmare for me,” said Santiago, “because it was like reliving that moment when Maria was in Puerto Rico.” In the aftermath of Ian, Santiago was displaced from a rental home where she had lived for only a week.
Santiago’s déjà vu is not unique among Puerto Rican survivors of Maria living in Central Florida. Many are still reeling from the trauma of economic hardship, poor relief efforts, and displacement that was only now starting to be addressed in Puerto Rico itself.
“There are people who feel like, ‘Man, I just came here from Puerto Rico and here I am in this situation again,’” said Jose Nieves, a pastor at the First United Methodist Church in Kissimmee, a suburb of Orlando. Nieves’ work in recent years has extended to supporting immigrant families affected by natural disaster displacement in Central Florida.
Central Florida is home to large Latin American and Caribbean communities. Many members work in low-wage and low-skilled jobs in the area’s robust tourism industry, which is nonetheless vulnerable to the economic fallout from natural disasters like Ian. Puerto Ricans and other Latin Americans are also among the millions of Florida residents who live in homes without flood insurance.
Earlier waves of Puerto Ricans had relocated to the mainland primarily for economic reasons. Along with those who came to Florida directly from the main island, thousands more had moved in recent years from other long-established Puerto Rican communities in New York and other parts of the Northeast.
By the time Santiago and her family arrived in Orlando in 2017, the metro area was already one of the fastest growing regions in the country. Over one million people of Puerto Rican origin now live in Florida, surpassing the number in New York. In Central Florida, Puerto Ricans make up the largest community of Latinos. Among them are sizable Colombian, Venezuelan, and other Latin American nationalities.
The Super 9 motel in Kissimmee, Florida, which became home to a number of Puerto Rican families displaced by Hurricane Maria in 2017.
Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda via Getty Images
Like many other Puerto Ricans who had come before her, Santiago thought that a new life in Florida would provide what Puerto Rico couldn’t: wages that they could live well on, stable housing and infrastructure, and a local government that was responsive to their needs and that would uphold their rights as U.S. citizens. There was also the benefit of a large network of Spanish speakers who could provide support and share resources on how to navigate social and civic life on the mainland. And perhaps above all, there was also a sense that in Florida their vulnerability to the devastation of tropical storms like Maria would be lessened.
At first, Santiago and her family settled at her sister’s house in Kissimmee. World famous theme parks like Walt Disney World and Universal Studios were minutes away, as was Orlando’s international airport. In December 2017, after finding out that the local government was providing hotel accommodation for those displaced by Maria, Santiago and her family moved into a local Super 8, one of several motels along Highway 192, Kissimmee’s main drag. Its concentration of hotels and motels has earned Kissimmee the moniker of “the hotel capital of Central Florida.”
In August of 2018, after more than eight months living at the Super 8, Santiago and her family started looking for more permanent places to stay. “By then the rents had skyrocketed and they were asking for $50 to $75 [a night] per head of family,” Santiago said of the motels. Landlords were also asking for two to three months rent for a deposit, a standard practice in Florida but one that took Santiago by surprise. “We said if we plan to stay we are going to [need] that money,” she said, “because we left Puerto Rico only with what little we had.” The family eventually settled in an apartment in Orlando.
Ian hit at a time when the cost of living in Central Florida had soared, housing had become more unaffordable, and wages had stagnated. “We’ve just seen this massive spike in the cost of rent and in the cost of everything else,” said Sam Delgado, the programs manager at Central Florida Jobs with Justice, or CFJWJ, an Orlando-based workers’ rights organization.
“They say we have California’s expenses and Alabama’s wages.”
Sam Delgado, program manager at Central Florida Jobs with Justice
Delgado explained that the timing of Hurricane Ian at the end of the month left many local families struggling with whether to prioritize emergency expenses or rent. In the wake of the storm’s devastation, many households were forced to use rent money to buy non-perishable food items and gasoline, or temporarily relocate their families to hotels. “People just don’t have enough money for an emergency,” he said.
Florida’s affordable housing crisis, as in the rest of the U.S., is the result of several factors: limited housing stock, zoning laws restricting construction of new rental housing, and stagnant wages that have not kept up with the cost of living. “They say we have California’s expenses and Alabama’s wages,” said Delgado.
Central Florida’s low-income Latino communities are among the hardest hit by the state’s housing crisis. They have some of Florida’s fewest financial and social resources to both prepare for disasters before they happen and to respond adequately after they do. Many live in properties such as mobile homes that are more affordable but less resilient to wind or flood damage.
For families that have previously been evicted or have a poor credit history, it’s even more difficult to secure housing in the traditional rental market. Throughout Orange County (of which Orlando is a part), Osceola County immediately south (home to Kissimmee), and even the Tampa Bay area along the Gulf Coast, the last option for these families is to move into hotels or motels. A number of such makeshift apartment complexes also became micro-communities for Puerto Ricans displaced by Hurricane Maria. The award-winning 2017 film, “The Florida Project,” dramatized the life of a family living in a motel in Kissimmee. But few see this trend as sustainable. “It’s expensive to be poor here because it costs way more to rent a hotel [room],” said Delgado.
And it’s only getting more expensive, as more extreme weather and displacement is putting pressure on the rental market. Prices for apartments are rising higher and higher to meet this demand. After recently looking for an apartment for she and her daughter, Santiago returned to her friend’s home, having had no luck at finding anything affordable. One place she looked at was asking $2,500 per month. “I don’t know what they were thinking,” she said.
In many ways, the housing crisis has faced no greater urgency. Coupled with the lack of affordable housing, many in the Puerto Rican and larger Latino communities feel that the local and state government is not doing enough to support those who have been displaced.
Camille A. Padilla Dalmau & María E. Ocasio Torres
“If you were out of your house for 15, 20 days because of the flood, because you didn’t have electricity or services, it shows that [the state] was negligent,” said Martha Perez, who is a resident of Sherwood Forest, a RV resort community in Kissimmee. Perez was forced to leave her home, where she lived alone, after Ian’s floodwaters made her community uninhabitable for weeks. Both Milly Santiago and Perez, a Mexican citizen, have received material support from Hablamos Español Florida, a social services organization geared to Latino immigrant families in the state.
“When our community gets hit by a hurricane, the recovery doesn’t take days or weeks. I mean, the reality is that many of those families are going to be struggling with the effects of the hurricanes for the next two years,” said Nieves of First United Methodist Church in Kissimmee. He says that the damage from Hurricane Ian has taken hundreds of homes off of the housing market, further exacerbating the affordability crisis.
For many locals and advocates, the needs that have arisen around housing, wages, and climate resilience are effectively the result of an unwillingness from those in power to address the needs of the state’s most vulnerable communities. And social support organizations and volunteers can only do so much. “Every time it’s a nonprofit organization responding to these immediate needs in communities, it looks more like a policy failure than it does a community coming together to help people,” said Delgado.
“What do I want from the government?” said Santiago. “I want them to be more fair with us, because there is a lot of injustice.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline After Hurricane Maria, many Puerto Ricans fled to Florida. Then Ian happened. on Dec 16, 2022.
