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This week’s edition features stories on progressive activism, dwindling salmon, how Chicago protects birds from an untimely death, the future of the craft of coding, and a profile of an odious (and powerful) literary agent.

1. Not One Tree

Grace Glass and Sasha Tycko | n+1 | October 26, 2023 | 16,313 words

Whether you’ve been following the Cop City saga closely, only just heard about it this week, or have no idea what I’m talking about, you should read this essay. For those who fall into the third category, here’s a quick primer: Cop City is the nickname of a law enforcement training campus under construction near Atlanta, on forested land once inhabited by Native people before they were forcibly removed, then turned into a slave plantation, then into a farm worked by prisoners. (“The plantation, the prison farm, the police academy: it sounds like a history of America,” Grace Glass and Sasha Tycko write.) Opponents of the project are known as “forest defenders,” and in an incident last January, one of them was shot and killed by police. This essay is an insider account of the Stop Cop City movement. It is detailed, smart, and very moving. It is about the beauty and the bloodshed of progressive activism, the stories that the land beneath us holds, the racist history of policing, and much, much more. In a word, it is epic. —SD

2. Salmon are Vanishing from the Yukon River — And So is A Way of Life

Max Graham | Grist | November 9, 2023 | 4,931 words

Salmon stocks are dwindling in the Yukon. That should concern all of us. As Max Graham reports for Grist, fewer and fewer fish are returning to spawn, causing governments to restrict or shut down harvests. The health and cultural consequences for remote indigenous populations that rely on annual salmon runs to feed their communities over a long winter—where a tin of Spam can cost $7.95—are impossible to quantify. The main culprit? Rising river and ocean temperatures due to climate change. “Salmon are cold-water species, so when temperatures go up, their metabolism increases, so they need more energy to just be, just live,” said Ed Farley, an ecologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center. “That means they’re going to have to feed more.” Of course, with an ecological conundrum such as this, cause and effect is far more complicated than that, and Graham deftly weaves fact and color from harvesters, elders, fishery officials, and scientists to help lay readers understand not just the scope of the problem, but the potentially devastating outcomes, for the fish and the people who rely on them. Can all the humans with their various interests come together to allow salmon stocks to rebound? For everyone’s sake, I hope that notion is more than just a fish story. —KS

3. City of Glass

Ben Goldfarb | bioGraphic | October 31, 2023 | 3,514 words

My previous house on an idyllic wooded half-acre in California’s rural West Sonoma County had lots of huge windows. So many, in fact, that birds often flew into them. Some were briefly stunned before flying off; others were not so lucky. Applying frosted decals and patterned coating to all the windows made our house more bird-safe. But what happens when an entire city is a lethal landscape for our winged friends? As Ben Goldfarb notes in this bioGraphic feature, Chicago is the most perilous city in the US for birds: its location within the Midwestern flyway—a migratory route for birds in the spring and fall—and its glass architecture and glittering lights make a deadly combination. (Case in point: on a single morning, conservation volunteers once collected around a thousand birds at McCormick Place, a massive convention center next to Lake Michigan, which is largely covered with glass and considered a collision hotspot.) Architects, building managers, and even politicians are taking measures to make Chicago more bird-friendly, but there’s still a lot of work to do. Goldfarb writes an informative piece that has something for everyone, including bird conservation, Chicago architecture and history, and urban design. —CLR

4. A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft

James Somers| The New Yorker | November 13, 2023 | 4,735 words

The age of the centaurs is here. While not beaten by Artificial Intelligence (yet), programmers have a new power—and the half-human, half-AI coding team is an impressive force. While dabbling with ChatGPT-4, Somers muses on his long coding career, and it was with a jolt that he reminded me of the “era of near-zero interest rates and extraordinary growth,” when coders were gods with endless free espressos. It’s changing fast. There is a lot out there on AI, but by putting this development in the context of his own career, Somers shines a bright, glaring light on the pivotal time in which we live. It’s not necessarily frightening: sure, things are changing, but they always have, and they always will. While coders of “agrarian days probably futzed with waterwheel and crop varietals,” the ones of the future may “spend their late nights in the guts of the AIs their parents once regarded as black boxes.” No doubt the centaurs will soon be replaced by full-on AI horses, but Somers is still confident coding isn’t dead. —CW

5. Days of the Jackal

Alex Blasdel | The Guardian | November 9, 2023 | 7,941 words

Reading this profile of Andrew Wylie, the most powerful agent in book publishing and apparently one of the most odious people alive, is like eating several Big Macs: an experience so delicious you don’t mind that it leaves you queasy when it’s over. The piece’s astounding anecdotes about a man whose life is as glamorous, and legacy as enormous, as his ego is hideous beg to be binged. Wylie, who is in the twilight of his career, is the kind of person who said of his favorite chain restaurant for weekday lunches, “You feel right next door to extreme poverty when you eat at Joe and the Juice, which is a comfortable place to be.” Wylie is also the kind of person who used the following words to describe his desire to dominate the Chinese publishing market: “We need to roll out the tanks…. We need a Tiananmen Square!” I tore through this profile and was soon texting lines from it to friends, gleeful with horror and liberal in my emoji deployment. Yes, readers, I was lovin’ it. —SD

Audience Award

Our most-read editor’s pick this week. Drum roll please:

Finding beauty in the Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The marmot’s early wake-up call. A long-form comic on sinking prisons. An ebullient character with the power to manipulate TikTok. And the reasons for a good scare.

1. I Loved “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” Before I Loved Myself

Zefyr Lisowski | Electric Lit | October 26, 2023 | 3,553 words

Apparently, this month marked the 49th anniversary of the seminal horror film Texas Chain Saw Massacre. (That odd-number-ness might explain why you haven’t been bombarded with oral histories, retrospectives, and inane listicles like “11 Times Leatherface Gave Glam-God Chic While Dismembering Hippies and We Can’t Stop Crying About It.”) I’ve never seen the movie, but that didn’t stop me from being mesmerized by Zefyr Lisowski’s essay about its outsized role in her life. Though the piece will linger with you, “haunting” is the wrong word here. Nothing about Lisowski’s prose is uncertain or vaporous; she shows the reader her scars from sentence one, and the next 3,500 words are equally stark and vulnerable. She came to Chain Saw in high school, a miserable adolescent desperate for the distraction of a watch-it-if-you-dare YouTube challenge. What she found was revelation: a brightness and beauty that helped her embrace her Southern roots, and ultimately her own self. “There are marks that are left on us, and there are marks we leave on ourselves, and I’m not sure there’s a significant difference between the two,” she writes. At multiple turns, she expresses a thought with such economy that it becomes nearly aphoristic, escaping the borders of an individual experience to become universal. That’s the mark of a great essay—whether you can stomach horror movies or not. —PR

2. The Broken Clock

David Gessner | Orion Magazine | October 11, 2023 | 1,997 words

I recently read that we’re in for an El Niño winter, which brings less precipitation and increases temperatures. I thought this was a cause for celebration—I’ll gladly take any relief from our brutal winters—until David Gessner helped me understand how global warming is altering the habits and habitats of birds and wildlife with his piece at Orion Magazine. “Consider the lowly marmot,” writes Gessner. (Up until this point, I had not considered the marmot at all other than being mildly amused at the screaming marmot meme, despite our recent move to its natural habitat.) All jokes aside, warmer winters cause marmots to emerge from hibernation earlier, before the green shoots they feed on sprout from the soil. “’The salad bar was open,’ is how Anthony Barnosky, a University of California paleoecologist, put it. ‘But now with warmer winters, they wake early and stumble out into a still snow-covered world. They starve.’” What I loved most about this piece—in addition to learning more about how habitats are stretching farther north—is how Gessner conveys that all is not doom and marmot gloom. Later hard frosts let marmots feed longer before hibernation, allowing them to put on more fat so that they’re better equipped to survive a shorter winter. “We humans have changed the basic cycles of the years. We have altered the clock of the world. . . .Noticing, it turns out, matters.” Now, if only we could turn back time. —KS

3. In Harm’s Way

Susie Cagle | The Marshall Project, in partnership with Grist | October 24, 2023

In the ’80s, a prison complex was constructed in Corcoran, a poor community in California’s Central Valley, in the dry Tulare lakebed. (Historically, Tulare Lake has been the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi.) The Department of Corrections convinced lawmakers to exempt the facility from environmental law. Fast-forward several decades, and the two prisons now house 8,000 people, the largest incarcerated population in the state. California’s very wet 2022-23 winter resulted in a record-high Sierra snowpack—great for drought conditions, but a threat to the state’s agricultural interior, bringing epic flooding to the region. In this engaging long-form comic, the first of its kind at The Marshall Project, Susie Cagle chronicles how decades-old decisions to hastily build the prisons has put thousands of incarcerated people at risk. (If you enjoy this piece, I also recommend Cagle’s illustrated Longreads feature about another rural Central Valley community, “After Water,” which offers a different angle on California’s climate and water crisis in a similarly engrossing way.) —CLR

4. Watch This Guy Work, and You’ll Finally Understand the TikTok Era

Brendan I. Koerner | Wired | October 19, 2023| 6,959 words

Brendan I. Koerner’s splendid, exuberant piece took me a long time to read. For starters, it’s nearly 7,000 words—but then there are the links. So. Many. Rabbit holes. Although not one to usually click on every link on offer, after becoming engrossed in how Ursus Magana’s company, 25/7, elaborately manipulates algorithms to link music with TikTok videos, I needed to see the wrestler videos that launched YoungX777’s “Toxic” and the teens twerking to Syko’s “#BrooklynBloodPop!” (No, I was not previously familiar with these works.) Despite the time invested, I remained fascinated throughout this deep dive into the creator economy—a mystical world that Magana can weave to his will like a magician. (Probably less mysterious for those who didn’t grow up in an era where a mobile phone’s greatest wonder was Snake.) The musicians and content creators are a diverse collection, being pulled out into the light from behind their bedroom doors, but they still pale against Magana, whose backstory demonstrates true entrepreneurship in the face of adversity. His frenetic, joyful character is what repeatedly pulled me back in from the wilds of the TikTok video vortex. —CW

5. The Evolutionary Reasons We Are Drawn to Horror Movies and Haunted Houses

Athena Aktipis, Coltan Scrivner | Scientific American | November 1, 2023 | 3,137 words

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a Halloween event. It was a big deal, with different haunted houses built in old farm buildings. As someone who jumps a mile if a piece of paper blows across my path, I wasn’t thrilled by the prospect—but my niece and her friend dragged me along. I’m not proud of how tightly I gripped the hands of those teens, or that I made them lead the way through rooms where witches and ghouls jumped out of the shadows (different teenagers, dressed up and trading their dignity for holiday money, but still terrifying). So why exactly did I do this to myself? Athena Aktipis and Coltan Scrivner know. Their absorbing essay details how this is all a part of our evolutionary past. A morbid fascination with danger is widespread amongst all animals—we inspect threats to know how to face them in the future. I was subconsciously rehearsing for when a real witch came to whisk me away. (Spoiler: she’d get me.) The modern decline in risky play has even led to increased anxiety in children. Full of such intriguing facts, Aktipis and Scrivner’s exploration into the psychology behind the scare will keep you on your toes—and inspire you to go out for some proper frights this Halloween weekend.  —CW

Audience Award

Who won the most sets of eyes this week?

(The excerpted text below is integrated and displayed within illustrations in the story.)

We can be prepared.

That’s a choice the state can make and it is choosing not to.

Emily Harris is Co-Director of Programs at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and advisor on a report on climate hazards facing California prisons.

A lot of the California prisons are located in remote areas, they have aging infrastructure, and a long history of overcrowding.

It’s very clear that people in prison are distinctly vulnerable.

Corrections says it has plans in place to deal with climate emergencies at its facilities.

As the incarceration rate drops, the department says it is prioritizing prisons for closure based on factors mandated by state law.

Those factors do no include environmental hazards or climate change.

In 2013, Rhodes launched a program aimed at preparing communities for a natural disaster, a civil war, or anything in between. He originally said the program — a national network of community groups akin to neighborhood watches — was intended to create “civilization preservation teams.” He soon gave them a far more innocuous-sounding new name: “community preparedness teams,” or CPTs. CPTs provide volunteers with medical, disaster, and fire safety training. As the Oath Keepers grew, changed, and increasingly made themselves known in the public sphere, the CPT program remained a relative constant — something “the group seems to view as core to its identity,” Jackson wrote in his book. 

The CPTs kept their eye on events with potential for conflict with government agencies. In 2014, they responded to Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s call to arms, after he refused to pay federal land management agencies millions of dollars in required fees to graze his herd of cattle on public land. They defended a gold mine from the Bureau of Land Management in Oregon in 2015. They were present that same year in Ferguson, Missouri, providing security, according to the group, for business owners during widespread protests on the anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager who was killed by police in 2014. And they provided relief in Conroe after Hurricane Harvey made landfall in 2017.

That year saw the dawn of a new era for FEMA. Harvey and two other hurricanes called Irma and Maria made landfall on U.S. soil in the same 30-day period, claiming thousands of lives, causing widespread destruction, and generating hundreds of billions of dollars in cumulative costs. The back-to-back disasters made it exceedingly clear that the federal government is unprepared for the consequences of climate change — more intense hurricanes, heavier floods, rising sea levels. 

Natural gas, wind, and solar power are all cutting into coal’s profitability, so mining companies are looking for ways to reduce expenses, including reducing clean-up efforts. In their three-part collaboration with Grist and The Texas Tribune, journalists Kiah Collier and Naveena Sadasivam expose the ways the good state of Texas allows coal companies to bypass federal laws about land reclamation in order to save millions in clean-up costs. “Coal companies are required to restore land used for coal mining to the shape it was in before they started digging it up,” Collier and Sadasivam write. This process of reclamation is meant to return mined land to its former condition so people can farm, graze, and even live on it again. Unfortunately, that is not happening.

One article tells how a company violated its contract and federal law and ruined large swaths of a family’s 25,000-acre ranch. One looks at how the town of Rockdale pinned its hopes to an old coal mine that was not properly restored, land where supposedly “pristine lakes” are actually old waste-water pools. The other article looks at the free land the Luminant coal company gave to Sulphur Springs, in East Texas, who intends to turn it into parkland ─ except the company is trying to avoid properly removing a huge mound of toxic dirt and a large, acidic wastewater pool. Instead, they want to cover the lake with a bit more dirt, even though that has proven ineffective for containing toxins, and the city wants to let them and turn the mound, which locals call Mount Thermo, into seating for an amphitheater, and the lake into a fishing pond. An amphitheater built atop toxic heavy metals! It’s lunacy! It’s also obviously about money. The free land is worth $25 million, and leaving the mess saves the company an estimated $4 million. To sell the idea to the public, interested parties have framed the toxic mound as a “community asset,” a gift from the company. Well, isn’t that swell?

In a prepared statement, Luminant spokesperson Meranda Cohn said that the company is committed to completing restoration of the property, including addressing the high acidity at the pit. She said the mound is being left in place at the city’s request and that any implication that Luminant’s deal with Sulphur Springs was solely a cost-saving measure was wrong.

“This transformative project would benefit the people of Sulphur Springs and East Texas for decades to come,” Cohn said. “This is a great example of how a public-private partnership between the city, Luminant, and the [Railroad Commission] can be a win for all.”

In 2017, the Texas Mining and Reclamation Association, of which Luminant is a member, honored Maxwell for his vision, granting him its “elected official of the year” award for “leading the charge to breathe new life into this community asset.”

Not everyone’s on board with this toxic plan.

Ryan King, a biologist at Baylor University who has served as an expert witness in half a dozen federal lawsuits against coal companies, said staff concerns over the company’s reclamation plan are well founded.

“The idea of an amphitheater and having a lot of people right where you can potentially have a lot of airborne dust that is almost certainly going to contain toxic materials seems like a very risky situation,” he said. “That community is either uninformed or being misled about the potential hazards of doing such a thing.”

But Maxwell, the city manager, doesn’t see the problem. He said he trusts the Railroad Commission and Luminant will work it out, and that the company will do the right thing. “We don’t see a lot of risk there,” he said.

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California avocados are, for the moment, one of America’s most popular foods. Yet some experts predict that climate change could cut California’s avocado production in half by 2050. New weather patterns will also affect the state’s other tree crops, including citrus, almonds, walnuts, and pistachios. But even if rising sea levels flood many coastal cities, many Golden State farmers still plan on growing food for a living.

At Grist, food writer Nathaneal Johnson shows how California farmers are planning ahead for climate change while balancing their immediate economic concerns. Farming is a matter of long-term planning: Just because there was a drought for a nearly six years doesn’t mean farmers can remove their thirsty nut trees and plant strawberries. Fortunately, scientists are studying crop varieties to find ones that could perform well under new weather patterns. California farmers are currently experimenting with cover crops to hold water and improve soil, and testing ways to recharge aquifers before the new state law bans excessive groundwater pumping. Will this all be enough to save them, and the food we rely on?

***

After the state’s recent drought, farmers who grow tree crops have a lot at stake when it comes to using water. While reporting your story, were most farmers forthcoming about their fears or concerns? Or were some hesitant about disclosing too much about their trade?

The farmers I talked to were happy to chat. These guys were all just people running small businesses. I wasn’t talking to the massive ranchers who are working the political angles (with the exemption of thepeople on the Almond Board, who are certainly politically savvy). For the most part, it seems to me that farmers feel misunderstood, so they are happy to try to set those misconceptions right.

I sensed some hesitation from certain farmers in talking about climate change and water—it didn’t seem like they were worried about pushing a particular angle, but they may have been worried about saying the wrong thing and looking like rubes, or attracting a lot of hate mail. I have a little bit of a track record of listening to farmers and taking them seriously, rather than using them to retrench the popular narrative, and that may have been worth something.

During the drought, almond farmers got a lot of flak for growing a seemingly thirsty crop when there was little to no surface water, but avocados need even more water than nuts. Why do you think avocados were spared the same wrath in the arena of public opinion? Is our love of guacamole that strong?

Well, our love for guac is indeed a powerful force, but I fear the answer is simpler and more boring. There just aren’t that many avocado orchards in California relative to other crops. Meanwhile, the market for almonds is booming, so you can drive around the Central Valley and see mile after mile of new almond groves. During the drought, when the hive mind became convinced that California was about to turn into an anarchic desert hellscape, the sight of all these new trees going in was dissonant.

As you said, most of us don’t really understand everything that goes into farming, so farmers can sometimes inform the public and correct misconceptions when they speak on record. But despite the hive mind’s concerns about thirsty farmers, does the public understands that that family farmer avocado groves and big almond orchards also keep urbanization at bay? 

The way we think about food production tends to be moralistic rather than pragmatic.  Even as I’m asking people to take the time to understand how farmers think, we also should take the time to understand how humans think. It’s normal and probably healthy to feel some moral outrage when we see people profiting off necessities of life like food, water, and housing. It the job of journalists to tap into that outrage and channel it toward a fuller understanding of the system and how it might be altered. When motivating moralism is paired with a pragmatic understanding of the way a system works, there’s the potential for truly positive change. If you just have the moralism you end up treating the symptoms rather than the disease, and punishing the people who are just playing by the rules we’ve set up in the system—you’ll end up trying to ban almonds, and you’ll be surprised when orchards turn into suburban sprawl.

As someone who frequently reports on agriculture, how much does a reporter need to understand the mechanics and economics of agriculture to write about? And how did you learn about it?

Every time I visit a farmer I learn something new. For instance, Chris Sayer showed me how he’d planted a few Haas avocado trees between his lemons, when he was experimenting with avocados as a crop. Haas trees have a lazy habit of draping their limbs down on the ground, but because these trees were competing with the lemons for light they grew up toward the sun ─ a happy accidental discovery from planting trees “too close.” That’s fascinating, or me at least, but way too arcane to include in the story.

I don’t think you need to know all those factoids to be write about farming, but you do need to follow the basic rules of journalism and seek out nonpartisan experts to help you figure out what you are looking at. It’s strange, but when journalists write about food and agriculture they will often call up experts who work for advocacy organizations, rather than seeking out more impartial experts at universities. There’s this thing called an “agricultural economist” who can cut through all the moralizing and show a reporter which policy solutions are most likely to work and why. There are thousands of ag scientists that we pay with our tax dollars who are happy to show journalists the evidence to determine which food arguments have merit and which are BS.  I do find it strange that I see so many stories published that basically perpetrate myths about food and farming. Why not just call up an academic or two for a gut check? If health reporters only called medical schools for comments on half their stories they’d be in trouble.

You live in Berkley, a land of farmers markets and farm-to-table restaurants. Do locals understand the profound ways that climate change will affect not only California agriculture but their lives as shoppers and diners? 

There’s certainly ample concern. And people talked a lot about it, especially during the drought. But just like the farmers we are trapped within our own systems, we could just as soon switch to eating prickly pears as ask farmers to start growing them Our diets are determined by tradition, prices, availability, the recipes that we learned to cook, the meaning we learned to ascribe to different foods. Markets and culture are more salient than climate change for the farmers, and that’s also true for the eaters. Even in Berkeley.

You wrote a fantastic book called Unseen City, about introducing your daughter to the wonders of nature by helping make nature less abstract to her. Do you and your wife think you’ll speak with your daughter about climate change?

We have two daughters now, and my older kid, Josephine, is 6, which is old enough to understand climate change. I’ve talked through the science with her both in the context of the Earth and in thinking about terraforming other planets—which was a much more exciting proposition for her. She liked the analogy of a puffy jacket getting thicker and thicker and warming up a planet. It doesn’t feel any more abstract than the notion of pollution—she can’t see that the car exhaust is dirty, but she understands that it is, and that it also contains gases that make the Earth’s atmospheric jacket thicker. She doesn’t understand the collective action problem, or the various policy prescriptions, and she hasn’t mastered the levers of international political economics. But wait until she’s 12.

California produces the bulk of America’s nuts, avocados, and citrus. Unfortunately, as the climate changes, no one’s sure how long those crops can grow. At Grist, Nathanael Johnson paints an unsettling portrait of California farmers struggling to balance their immediate need for annual income with the changing climate’s ability to support their trees in the future. California’s weather is increasingly erratic and it’s already confusing crops, ripening some fruits out of season and frying others in the sun. But as an experienced University of California extension agent put it: climate is only one of farmers’ many concerns.

“If you decide what to plant based on climate, but then can’t make the lease payment, that’s not sustainable,” Jarvis-Shean said.

If you are worried about water running out in 15 years, you might think it’s a good idea to cut down half the state’s almond groves — but if those almond trees are still putting money in your pockets, that wouldn’t make sense until the killer drought hits. That’s the crux of the matter for Sayer, and other farmers I interviewed. They’re concerned about the changing climate, but they always come up with ingenious plans to adapt to bad weather. It’s much harder for them to adapt to an overdrawn bank account.

Sayer grows mostly lemons right now, but they’re not long for this world. “You can see these lemon trees are getting a little rangy looking,” Sayer said, gesturing toward a leafless branch. “This is going to be their last harvest, then they’ve got a date with the chipper.”

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Kenya Downs | Grist and Longreads | March 2018 | 12 minutes (2,896 words)

The following Longreads Exclusive was produced in partnership with Grist.

Rev. Paul Wilson fastens enough buttons on his jacket to stay warm on a chilly fall afternoon but still keep his clergy collar visible. He’s whipping up a crowd of demonstrators in downtown Richmond, Virginia, where they’re waiting to make a short march from Richmond’s Capitol Square Bell Tower to the nearby National Theatre. His eyes covered by sunglasses, and his head by a newsboy hat, Wilson speaks to the assembled about their Christian responsibility to protect the planet.

They’ve gathered for the Water Is Life Rally & Concert, an event to protest the proposed construction of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. The development, a joint venture between several energy companies (including Richmond-based Dominion Energy), would carry natural gas 600 miles from West Virginia to North Carolina.

The pipeline’s proposed route runs directly between Union Hill and Union Grove Baptist churches, the two parishes where Wilson serves as pastor in rural Buckingham County, 70 miles south of Richmond. The proposed site for the pipeline’s 54,000-horsepower, gas-fired compressor station is also set to be built right between them.

Wilson fears the station could put his congregation and the surrounding community at risk of a range of ailments, especially asthma, because those living near natural gas facilities often suffer from chronic respiratory problems.

“God gave man dominion over the earth, but not permission to destroy it,” Wilson later tells me as we discuss the pipeline over coffee at a diner in a suburb north of Richmond.

Even though the Water Is Life Rally was held in the Bible Belt, Rev. Wilson was the only speaker who cited scripture and invoked Jesus Christ. Drums and tambourines reverberated in unison to chants of “No justice, no peace! No pipelines on our streets!”, and the event’s other speakers railed against the greed of Big Oil companies and U.S. imperialism.

At another rally focused on fossil fuels a year earlier in Richmond, religion was front and center.

In December 2016, gospel music stars descended on a local community center in Richmond’s East Highland Park neighborhood. Hundreds of residents from throughout the area had answered the call to attend a concert marketed as an opportunity for enlightenment, both spiritual and environmental.

As a sea of hands waved through the air as eyes closed in prayer, what many in the crowd didn’t know was that they were the target of a massive propaganda campaign. One of the event’s sponsors was a fossil-fuel advocacy group called Fueling U.S. Forward, an outfit supported by Koch Industries, the petrochemicals, paper, and wood product conglomerate founded by conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch.

The gospel program was designed to highlight the benefits of oil and natural gas production and its essential role in the American way of life. During a break in the music, a panel discussion unfolded about skyrocketing utility costs. The lobbyists and businesspeople on the panel presented a greater reliance on fossil fuels — billed as cheap, reliable energy sources — as the fix. Later, a surprise giveaway netted four lucky attendees the opportunity to have their power bills paid for them.

The event was one big bait and switch, according to environmental experts and local activists. Come for the gospel music, then listen to us praise the everlasting goodness of oil and gas. Supporting this sort of pro-oil-and-gas agenda sprinkled over the songs of praise, they say, would only worsen the pollution and coastal flooding that come with climate change, hazards that usually hit Virginia’s black residents the hardest.

“The tactic was tasteless and racist, plain and simple,” says Kendyl Crawford, the Sierra Club of Richmond’s conservation program coordinator. “It’s exploiting the ignorance many communities have about climate change.”

Rev. Wilson likens that gospel concert to the Biblical story of Judas accepting 30 pieces of silver to betray Jesus. Like many African Americans in Virginia, he initially didn’t connect environmental policy with what he calls the “institutional racism” — think racial profiling, lack of economic opportunity, etc. — that can plague black communities nationwide. Now he considers “the sea level rising or the air quality in the cities” another existential threat.

So in response to the Koch Brothers’ attempt to sway their flocks, Wilson and others affiliated with black churches in Virginia have channeled their outrage into a new calling: climate advocacy. For Wilson, environmentalism has become a biblical mission.

“The climate is changing,” he says. “And it’s black folk in Virginia who will lose the most.”

***

The billionaire Koch brothers are one of the driving forces behind right-wing campaigns throughout the country. One of their primary activities is promoting fossil fuel production. According to Virginia environmental groups, that involves efforts to deny the existence of climate change and stifle renewable energy policies.

In struggling cities and towns, Big Oil bills itself as a savior, raising the hope that new plants and pipelines, like the Atlantic Coast project, will bring jobs and tax revenue. With an extensive network of advocacy groups throughout the country, the Koch Brothers can spread that message anywhere, outsourcing efforts to sway public opinion without people realizing they’re pulling the strings.

Fueling U.S. Forward, until recently, was one of those campaigns. When HuffPost first reported on its existence in early 2016, the group had an annual budget of roughly $10 million and was run by Charles Drevna, a former petroleum industry lobbyist, and James Mahoney, a board member and former executive for Koch Industries. Later that summer, Drevna spoke at the Red State Gathering in Denver, telling the right-wing activist conference — in a speech where he referred to EPA employees as “clowns” — that the fossil fuel industry was losing ground because it was failing to connect with the public, especially minority communities, on a cultural, emotional, and personal level.

“We’ve done a terrible job in working with individual communities, working with the minority communities on how important energy is to them,” he said in a Facebook Live chat during the gathering with Fueling U.S. Forward’s communications director at the time, Alex Fitzsimmons. “And who gets hit the hardest when there’s a spike in energy costs? They get hit the most, and they get hit the hardest.”

A year ago, The New York Times reported that the nonprofit had started making inroads among African Americans. The group had helped sponsor the National Black Political Convention in 2016 where delegates added language to their platform characterizing policies that subsidize electric cars and residential solar as benefiting the rich at the expense of African Americans.

At the Richmond gospel concert, Fueling U.S. Forward sought to link energy production to the everyday issues that it said stymie economic mobility for African Americans — such as prices at the gas pump, heating, and electric bills. That message was delivered in part through discussions featuring prominent African-American business leaders.

“It was a deliberate strategy to manipulate black Virginians into supporting fossil fuels,” the Sierra Club’s Crawford says.

One of the participants was Derrick Hollie, a career marketing consultant who is also the founder of Reaching America, a nonprofit that describes itself as “focused on innovative solutions for African Americans not based on right or left wing views but what makes sense for a more united America.” Reaching America cosponsored the Fueling U.S. Forward gospel concert along with Radio One, an entertainment network targeting African Americans now known as Urban One. The corporation once employed Hollie as a national sales manager.

Despite Reaching America’s nonpartisan claims, Hollie has been associated with the black conservative network Project 21 and identified as a right-winger on TV news shows. And much of Hollie’s environmental advocacy has been in line with the Koch brothers’ priorities. His arguments focus on what he calls “energy poverty” — when low-income households spend large portions of their disposable income to keep the lights on and fill up their gas tanks. He’s invoked the phrase while speaking in support of fracking in Maryland, Rick Perry’s appointment to lead the Department of Energy, and most recently, the Trump administration’s planned withdrawal from the Paris accord. Hollie did not respond to requests for an interview.

While Hollie has remained visible since the Richmond event — launching a Reaching America podcast series and palling around with Perry and other Cabinet secretaries — Fueling U.S. Forward has gone dark. Calls and emails to Fueling U.S. Forward and its president Charles Drevna to comment for this story were not returned.

Fitzsimmons, the group’s communications director, has moved to Perry’s Department of Energy, where he’s the chief policy advisor in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. The organization’s website appears to have been shut down last fall, all videos from its YouTube page have been removed, and its social media platforms haven’t been updated in more than a year.

But Fueling U.S. Forward’s message lives on. Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, employs talking points that echo those Drevna used while promoting the organization in conservative circles, complaining that the EPA’s regulations pick “winners and losers” in the energy space.

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Rev. Faith Harris remembers first hearing ads about the Fueling U.S. Forward gospel concert on urban radio stations back in 2016. A minister, teacher, and environmental activist at Virginia Union University, a Richmond-based historically black college, Harris was among many African Americans in the region angered by what she calls a “purposeful misinformation” campaign. She says it was surreal to hear a D.J. invite listeners to “learn the truth” about whether the country is using enough fossil fuels.

“I called the radio station to ask, ‘How could you do that?’” she recalls. “The debate isn’t whether there are enough fossil fuels, but about the health and environmental impact they have on the way we live on this planet.”

In the months after the gospel concert, the backlash bubbled slowly through neighborhoods, led mostly by community activists and clergy like Rev. Harris. It picked up steam following the Times article. Ultimately, Fueling U.S. Forward’s strategy of influencing one of the black community’s most sacred institutions — the church — would prove to be folly.

Within environmental advocacy circles, Harris says, there was an increased urgency to tell neighborhood leaders that the concert was part of a public relations campaign for oil and gas interests. The campaign had the unintended effect of rallying the Richmond black community against the Kochs and their goals.

Revs. Harris and Wilson now regularly tell their congregations how the fossil fuel industry harms low-income communities and people of color. Sea-level rise on Virginia’s coast has put low-lying cities in the Hampton Roads area, including Norfolk and Newport News — both of which are more than 40 percent black — at risk of extreme flooding. A hurricane during high tide could see entire neighborhoods populated primarily by African Americans and the poor swallowed up by the Chesapeake Bay.

“We in the church community have a moral responsibility to be out front on protecting our flock from climate change,” Harris says. “I call it an authentic pro-life agenda. The Christian church, for too long, has allowed ‘pro-life’ to be defined solely as conception when, in fact, life is much more complex. It includes our quality of life while we’re here.”

The state’s African-American residents already face high rates of respiratory problems related to the processing of fossil fuels, like those that would flow through the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. In Norfolk, clouds of dust from coal residue from nearby shipping yards and factories often cover parked vehicles. With such close proximity to toxic air pollution, nearly 11 percent of the state’s black population has asthma, higher than the national average of 7.6 percent.

Richmond remains one of the deadliest places in the U.S. for people suffering from asthma, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, a consequence of a high poverty rate and a large proportion of uninsured. The chronic respiratory condition is linked to living near industrial factories, as well as urban planning that drove interstate highways — and their accompanying diesel pollution — through many black neighborhoods.

“We have a coal factory right in the neighborhood,” says Antonio Branch, a community organizer with Richmond-based Virginia Civic Engagement Table, an organization aimed at educating vulnerable communities about risks to their health. “I’m asthmatic. My mother is asthmatic and she grew up in the same area. My son is asthmatic, and I have a baby boy who may soon be diagnosed.”

Branch considers the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline “part of a larger environmental attack” on minority communities in Virginia and neighboring North Carolina, two states on planned pipeline route. Many of the region’s proposed oil and gas projects sit near poor and rural areas. In Virginia’s Buckingham County, home to Rev. Wilson’s churches, the community closest to that facility is 85 percent African American. By contrast, the state’s overall black population is 19 percent.

“This isn’t a coincidence,” Branch says.

***

While gospel provided the soundtrack to the Fueling U.S. Forward event in Richmond, it was bluegrass and folk that pumped through the loudspeakers at December’s Water Is Life Rally. Rev. Wilson was one of a dozen or so African Americans taking part in the event. Most of those assembled to protest the Atlantic Coast Pipeline were white millennials and baby boomers who donned anti-establishment paraphernalia and waved “No Pipeline” signs to the honking cars that passed by.

Kiquanda Baker, the Hampton Roads organizer for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, helped put together the Water Is Life Rally. She sees African-American leadership as an essential part of changing the narrative surrounding climate change. But she admits that while the community is becoming more engaged in green issues, it hasn’t quite begun to break down the archetype of the white environmentalist.

Adding environmentalism to the fight for social justice that’s part of the African-American experience, she says, is the most critical aspect of swaying communities of color to fight global warming.

“Our role as community leaders is to show that all of these issues are connected,” Baker says. “The more aware we are of environmental injustices, the less likely our communities can be tricked into rallies by the Koch brothers.”

Baker says outreach efforts are slowly making progress throughout the state, even if community members aren’t yet the most vocal activists. But she’s encouraged that African-American residents are increasingly active where it counts most: the voting booth.

“A few folks I talk with, they may not be at the point where they’re ready to canvas or march,” she says. “But they are better informed about who they’re voting for and which corporations and interests would also be getting their vote.”

Virginia’s black community is also becoming more active in pressing elected officials on the environment and climate change. Two months after the gospel concert, clergy members joined the Virginia Conservation Network — a coalition of organizations and community members that advocates for clean energy and environmental justice — for a panel discussion on how to inoculate themselves from Fueling U.S. Forward–type messaging. Freshman Democratic Congressman A. Donald McEachin, who’d recently been elected to represent Virginia’s 4th District — which runs from the southwestern suburbs of Richmond to the southeast corner of the state — joined the discussion. He has since joined with two other freshman representatives to form the United for Climate and Environmental Justice Congressional Task Force.

After Harris and other activists spent months petitioning the state government, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe established an Advisory Council on Environmental Justice in October. Its role is to provide the governor with independent recommendations on combating “disproportionately high or adverse effects from pollution” that fall on low-income residents and communities of color. Harris is one of the advisors, and she sees her participation as part of a larger theological crusade.

“In black communities, the clergy has always been the leading voice of the oppressed,” she says. “So when it comes to making sure our flock have a planet to call home, it’s a fight we have to be in front of.”

Rev. Wilson has also been preparing for the battle ahead. He’s already been arrested for protesting the Atlantic Coast Pipeline at the Virginia Governor’s Mansion. (He was sentenced to community service.) But as he made the trek back to Buckingham County after the Water is Life Rally, he was worrying about what the future holds, both for the pipeline he’s battling and his community.

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline is already a year behind schedule, and last November’s statewide elections could signal that momentum is swinging back in environmentalists’ favor. Democrats picked up seats in the House of Delegates, which could alter the timeline of the pipeline’s development. Several bills are currently up for vote that would require pipeline operators to obtain more permits before construction could begin.

When he’s not tending to his two churches, Wilson is a fifth-generation owner of a funeral home. He expects his daughter to take over the family business in the coming years, and his grandson has already chosen to study mortuary science, making it likely he’ll be the seventh generation to oversee the funeral home. Wilson hopes that by the time his grandson is running things, the environmental threats to his family and church members won’t have business booming at the funeral home for all the wrong reasons.

“God didn’t put me on this earth to pimp death for profit,” Wilson says. “That’s what the Kochs and these energy folks are doing to my people now. It’s up to us in the church to stop it.”

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Kenya Downs is a multimedia journalist based in Washington, D.C.