With much of the southwest baking under record temperatures, immigrants’ rights advocates worry President Joe Biden’s decision to effectively close the border to asylum seekers for the foreseeable future will endanger lives and further marginalize climate-displaced people seeking refuge in the U.S.
Their concerns come as a heat dome lingering over Mexico and the southwestern United States has obliterated temperature records from Phoenix to Sacramento, California. The searing conditions had health officials urging people to limit their time outdoors and take other steps to protect themselves from a climate-charged high pressure system that has killed dozens of people across several states in Mexico. The promise of a hotter-than-average summer has raised fears that Biden’s directive, which allows the government to suspend border crossings when they surpass 2,500 daily, will lead to a surge in heat-related illnesses and possibly deaths.
“This executive order being issued at this time is an additional cruelty that will force more people into dangerous conditions where they’re exposed to a really severe climate impact,” said Ahmed Gaya, director of the Climate Justice Collaborative at the National Partnership for New Americans.
Biden’s decision to drastically regulate a legal pathway into the country for the bulk of migrants at the southern border, with limited exceptions such as unaccompanied minors, is “clearly a political stunt,” Gaya said. “Given the fact that many of the people at the border have climate driving the root cause of their migration and need to seek safety, they are now at the border being forced to wait in limbo indefinitely, while their asylum is shut down under this order, and being exposed to severe climate impacts that risk their lives,” he said.
“This policy’s implementation collides with the hottest, most dangerous months on record as the climate crisis continues to accelerate,” said Kim Nolte, CEO of Migrant Clinicians Network. “We fear that this policy will result in more deaths as desperate people are pushed further and further into remote and lethally hot areas to cross the border.”
Past research on the risks of climate migration faced by people around the world suggest this could very well be the case. “As temperatures increase, we will absolutely see higher mortality, illness, death and injury for these asylum seekers that are coming to the U.S., seeking safety,” said Anne Junod, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute who studies climate migration.
The Biden administration’s directive is “actually more extreme” than similar policies the Trump administration enacted, and just as unlikely to hold up in court, said Sarah Rich, senior supervising attorney and interim senior policy counsel at the Southern Poverty Law Center. (The American Civil Liberties Union has announced its intention to sue the Biden administration over the order.)
Border Patrol agents have already begun turning back migrants at the international border to prevent them from reaching U.S. soil — a revival of a controversial Trump-era policy of physically blocking asylum seekers from entering the country, which is required to claim asylum.
Beyond barring entry, Biden’s proclamation denies asylum to all who enter between ports, increases the legal standards required to receive asylum, and gives those seeking it only four hours to prepare for their initial interview, including attempts to contact and consult with legal counsel, according to Rich. It also means that the only way to be granted asylum in the U.S. is to make an appointment via the CBP One app, which can take months and is “essentially a lottery system,” she said.
The immigrant rights community in the U.S., is, according to Rich, collectively opposed to the Biden administration’s latest executive action. “We are upset. We are disappointed. Many people are enraged by this. It feels like a real betrayal,” she said.
One of the Biden administration’s first actions coming into office was making climate-related migration a priority, noted Gaya, but the administration has since moved in the opposite direction. “This further goes down the wrong road, in the wrong direction, by cutting off more avenues for folks who are seeking asylum, often on grounds that include climate impacts, from doing so,” he said. “This executive order is both a deep disappointment on President Biden’s immigration promises, as well as on his hopes to be a climate leader.”
Corporations churn out single-use plastic packaging by the truckload — disposable yogurt cups, takeout food containers, shopping bags, mailers, cling wrap, and more. These items comprise much of the 19 million metric tons of plastic waste that ends up in the environment each year. As such, many companies have made vague promises to address the plastic pollution crisis by increasing the recyclability of their packaging and reducing the amount of virgin material they use.
But they’re not doing enough.
According to a new analysis published Wednesday by the shareholder advocacy nonprofit As You Sow, dozens of the world’s largest companies are falling short on both ambition and action to ensure plastic packaging doesn’t end up in landfills or littering the environment. Too few companies have quantitative sustainability targets for plastic, the report says, and those that do are either setting the bar too low or are failing to make significant progress — or both.
“Every company can be doing more,” said Kelly McBee, circular economy manager at As You Sow and one of the report’s co-authors. In particular, she said corporations should place more emphasis on reducing the plastic they use, rather than replacing virgin plastic with recycled content.
For its report, As You Sow looked at annual reports, sustainability reports, filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other publicly available resources from 225 of the world’s most valuable companies across five sectors: apparel, food and beverage, household products, quick-service restaurants, and retail. The nonprofit evaluated these corporations on six criteria related to advancing a “circular economy for plastic packaging,” referring to a system that keeps plastic in use for as long as possible before it has to be thrown away.
These criteria included the recyclability of companies’ plastic packaging, whether that packaging is made from recycled material, and how much of it is reusable. The report also considered companies’ efforts to reduce plastic use and support extended producer responsibility, or EPR, policies that would make them financially responsible for managing their plastic packaging after it’s sold to consumers.
Each company got scores for overall ambition and overall action, which, combined, contributed to a letter grade. Measurable steps were weighted more heavily than targets “to elevate the importance of action over words,” as McBee put it.
No company got an A, and only nine got a B. Half got an F, and almost every industry was characterized by “unambitious to modest goals” with “slow progress” toward achieving them. The industries with the highest average scores were cosmetics, household products, alcoholic beverages, and consumer electronics. Those at the bottom were hospitality, chemicals, and motor vehicles.
It’s not the first time As You Sow has brought scrutiny upon companies that contribute to the plastics crisis. Previous reports in 2020 and 2021 ranked a smaller cohort of companies on their commitments to sustainable packaging and found similar shortcomings on reuse, data transparency, and financial contributions to waste management infrastructure.
In its most recent report, As You Sow also found that few companies had a quantitative, time-bound target for switching to reusable packaging, although many had pilot programs. And of the 147 companies with a package recyclability goal, only 15 percent were on track to meet it.
These findings line up with what some other groups have found about the gap between companies’ plastic promises and their actions. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for a circular economy, reported last year that corporations that had signed on to its “global commitment” to advance plastics circularity had collectively made no progress to reduce virgin plastic use since 2018.
Melissa Valliant, communications director for the nonprofit advocacy group Beyond Plastics, said these findings are in some ways unsurprising. “Historically, goals from the largest consumer goods companies have served as pretty PR stunts that generate headlines and reassure the public,” she told Grist. She said As You Sow’s findings emphasize the need for government regulation — not just voluntary corporate commitments — to expedite companies’ progress.
Of all the ways companies can make their plastic pledges more credible, McBee says her top recommendation is that they think beyond goals to reduce just their virgin plastic use, referring to plastics that are made directly from fossil fuels. Companies with such a goal tend to replace their virgin plastic with recycled material — a swap that may increase circularity, but does not address what As You Sow calls “a key driver of pollution”: the overuse of plastic.
Instead, As You Sow calls for companies to decrease their “plastic use intensity,” or the amount of plastic used for each dollar of revenue. This might be accomplished by redesigning packaging to have less surface area or thinner plastic layers, or by eliminating unnecessary types of plastic packaging.
Notably, reducing plastic use intensity is not the same as reducing net plastic use. If a company produces a lot more of a given product, its overall use of plastic packaging could grow even if it’s making less plastic per dollar earned. This is essentially what has happened with Coca-Cola, which said in its most recent sustainability report that it had “avoided half a million metric tons of virgin plastic” in 2022 but increased its total virgin plastic use due to “growth of plastic packaging.”
Plastic bottles of Coca-Cola and Sprite on a grocery store shelf.
Joe Raedle / Getty Images
McBee said absolute reduction targets would be ideal, but that intensity targets can give more flexibility to growing businesses. This is a position that is perhaps informed by As You Sow’s status as both a shareholder and an advocate. The organization buys shares in major companies and uses them as leverage, either to negotiate directly with executives or to file resolutions on environmental practices. As an advocacy group, As You Sow wants companies to adopt the most robust environmental policies; as a shareholder, McBee said As You Sow is “financially invested in the success of these companies.”
Valliant, with Beyond Plastics, pushed back on the idea of plastic intensity targets and called for “a solution that doesn’t bring more plastic into our lives and the planet and our bodies.”
“At the end of the day,” she told Grist, “we need less plastic overall.”
Either way, both McBee and Valliant agreed that companies should be investing more in reusable packaging and packaging-free product formats — for example, concentrated soap tablets that don’t need to come in a plastic bottle. Valliant said the need to prioritize reusable over recycled packaging is especially urgent given research suggesting that recycling plastic increases its toxicity.
As You Sow’s other recommendations for companies include eliminating toxic chemicals from plastic products, phasing out or dramatically reducing the use of flexible and multilaminate plastic packaging (like the plastic used in bags of potato chips), and making financial contributions to recycling infrastructure that are commensurate with the amount of plastic packaging they produce. To incentivize some of these measures, the report suggests that companies align CEO compensation with key benchmarks for circularity. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, some companies like Mars and Coca-Cola are beginning to do this.
If the environmental costs of inaction on plastics aren’t persuasive enough, then perhaps the legal, regulatory, and reputational ones are. By failing to act more aggressively, companies may be exposing themselves to investigations and lawsuits from state attorneys general and to increasingly common bansand restrictions on whole categories of plastic. Plus, there’s the United Nations’ global plastics treaty, which environmental advocates are hoping will place a cap on the amount of plastic the world produces annually.
Stronger action on plastics can also appease consumers. According to McBee, customers are increasingly connecting the “ambiguous” issue of plastic pollution back to individual companies that are responsible for it. “They’re going out of their way to support the companies that are making a difference,” she said, “and facilitating the creation of the world they want to live in.”
Iceland has granted a 2024 whaling license to its one remaining whaling company, Hvalur hf., according to the government, drawing criticism from whale protection advocates.
The company will be allowed to kill 99 fin whales in West Iceland and Greenland and 29 of the gigantic mammals in East Iceland and the Faroe Islands, the fisheries ministry said, as Reuters reported.
“It’s ridiculous that in 2024 we’re talking about target lists for the second-largest animal on Earth, for products that nobody needs,” Patrick Ramage, director of International Fund for Animal Welfare, told Reuters.
In Iceland, the whaling season is from the middle of June to late September. Most of the whale meat is sold to Japan.
After Japan, Iceland is the second nation to allow the continuation of fin whaling this year.
During the mid-1900s, the whaling industry killed almost 725,000 fin whales in the Southern Hemisphere, NOAA Fisheries said. Though their numbers have improved and are said to be increasing since hunting bans were implemented by many countries during the 1970s, they are nowhere near what they once were.
A recent report by the food and veterinary authority of Iceland, Mast, said no significant improvement had been made to the animal welfare status of whale hunts last year compared with 2022, despite new regulations, The Guardian reported.
“It’s hard to fathom how and why this green light to kill 128 fin whales is being given,” Ramage said. “There is clearly no way to kill a whale at sea without inflicting unthinkable cruelty.”
The Mast report found that some whales who had been harpooned did not die for two hours. The report questioned if the hunting of large whales would ever be able to meet animal welfare standards.
“It is unbelievable and deeply disappointing that the Icelandic government has granted [this], defying extensive scientific and economic evidence against such actions,” said Luke McMillan, an anti-whaling activist with Whale and Dolphin Conservation, as reported by The Guardian.
On June 20 of last year, Iceland instituted a two-month suspension on whaling after a government-commissioned inquiry found that the hunting methods being used did not meet animal welfare laws, AFP reported.
In October, Hvalur said 24 whales had been killed during the shortened three-week whaling season.
Whether Bjarkey Olsen Gunnarsdottir, Iceland’s food, fisheries and agriculture minister, would grant a whale hunting license for this year’s season had been unclear.
“It is devastatingly disappointing that Minister Gunnarsdottir has set aside unequivocal scientific evidence demonstrating the brutality and cruelty of commercial whale killing and allowed whales to be killed for another year,” Adam Peyman, wildlife programs director for Humane Society International, told AFP.
“Whales already face myriad threats in the oceans from pollution, climate change, entanglement in fish nets and ship strikes, and fin whale victims of Iceland’s whaling fleet are considered globally vulnerable to extinction,” added Peyman.
The United States Supreme Court has asked the Biden administration to weigh in on oil companies’ efforts to avoid a lawsuit brought by Honolulu. The suit alleges the companies misled the public regarding the contribution of their fossil fuel emissions to climate change and could potentially cost them billions.
The request by the Supreme Court will delay the justices’ decision on whether to hear an appeal by the fossil fuel companies after Hawaii’s highest court ruled the litigation could go to trial.
“Big oil companies are fighting desperately to avoid trial in lawsuits like Honolulu’s, which would expose the evidence of the fossil fuel industry’s climate lies for the entire world to see,” said Richard Wiles, Center for Climate Integrity president, as reported by Reuters.
Defendants in the lawsuit include Sunoco, BP, Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Shell, Marathon Petroleum and BHP Group.
The legal position of the Biden administration will be filed by the Justice Department’s solicitor general.
The original lawsuit — filed four years ago by the county and city of Honolulu, along with the city’s water supply board — said the oil majors’ misleading statements regarding the impact of their products opened the door for infrastructure and property damage brought about by human-induced climate change.
The Supreme Court’s order comes after conservative supporters of the companies published a host of advertisements and op-eds, The Guardian reported.
“I have never, ever seen this kind of overt political campaign to influence the court like this,” professor Patrick Parenteau, Vermont Law School senior climate policy fellow, expressed last week to The Guardian.
Climate litigation advocates have said the solicitor general should reject the petition and affirm the earlier decision of Hawaii’s supreme court.
American and Hawaiian flags atop the Ali’iolani Hale, the former royal residence and now Supreme Court of Hawaii. jewhyte / iStock / Getty Images Plus
Honolulu is one of many cities and states to have brought legal action against oil companies for concealing the hazards of their products.
The fossil fuel companies insisted federal law should govern the problem of greenhouse gas emissions.
“[T]he Hawaii Supreme Court’s decision flatly contradicts U.S. Supreme Court precedent and federal circuit court decisions, including the Second Circuit which held in dismissing New York City’s similar lawsuit, ‘such a sprawling case is simply beyond the limits of state law.’ These meritless state and local lawsuits violate the federal constitution and interfere with federal energy policy,” Chevron’s lawyer Ted Boutrous said in a statement, as reported by The Hill.
However, plaintiffs Honolulu and its water supply board said the suit is “not seeking to solve climate change or regulate emissions,” but trying to get big oil to “stop lying and pay their fair share of the damages they knowingly caused,” said Alyssa Johl, vice president and general counsel at the Center for Climate Integrity, as The Guardian reported.
Napa Valley, a famous wine region in northern California, is facing pollution risks from a local landfill.
The Clover Flat Landfill, which has been operating since the 1960s, is located near two streams that flow into the Napa River. According to a news report by The Guardian, the landfill may be contributing to pollution runoff into the nearby waterways.
The Napa River is an important source of water for local agriculture, including vineyards, as well as for recreation.
“The Napa valley is amongst the most high-value agricultural land in the country,” Geoff Ellsworth, the former mayor of St. Helena, a city in Napa County, and a former employee at the landfill, told The Guardian. “If there’s a contamination issue, the economic ripples are significant.”
Emails and reports from former employees and regulators have raised concerns over contamination from the landfill and waste company Upper Valley Disposal Services (UVDS), both of which were once owned by the Pestoni family, according to The Guardian.
As Waste Dive reported in 2022, the landfill and waste disposal service companies were acquired by Texas-based Waste Connections.
Christina Pestoni, the former chief operating officer for Upper Valley Disposal & Recycling and current director of government affairs for Waste Connections, previously shared a statement contradicting the claims made against the landfill and the waste disposal company, asserting that the companies complied with regulations and operated at the “highest environmental standards.” The statement specified that no waste from the Clover Flat Landfill reached or impacted the Napa River.
In December 2023, a group of 23 employees and former employees of the landfill and UVDS filed a complaint to the California Environmental Protection Agency over “impacts from concerning and unlawful environmental practices at UVDS/CFL” with complaints about treatment of Latino workers, threats of retaliation, exposure to untreated garbage wastewater, and ghost piping — which was described in the filed complaint as unmapped piping to divert wastewater and leachate into public waterways.
The complaint also raised concerns over per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that were found in samples from the landfill’s leachate and groundwater and waste and compost fires that have broken out at the landfill, according to documents obtained by The New Lede, a reporting initiative from Environmental Working Group (EWG).
“Both UVDS and [CFL] have no business being in the grape-growing areas or at the top of the watershed of Napa county,” Frank Leeds, operator of an organic vineyard near UVDS, told The Guardian. “There are homes and vineyards all around that are affected by them.”
Eileen White, executive officer of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, told The Guardian that the potential environmental impacts liked to the landfill and UVDS are under investigation.
Since the 1980s, the 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River that connects New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has been known as “Cancer Alley.” The name stems from the fact that the area’s residents have a 95 percent greater chance of developing cancer than the average American. A big reason for this is the concentration of industrial facilities along the corridor — particularly petrochemical manufacturing plants, many of which emit ethylene oxide, an extremely potent toxin that is considered a carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency and has been linked to breast and lung cancers.
But even though the general risks of living in the region have been clear for decades, the exact dangers are still coming into focus — and the latest data show that the EPA’s modeling has dramatically underestimated the levels of ethylene oxide in southeastern Louisiana. On average, according to a new study published on Tuesday, ethylene oxide levels in the heart of Cancer Alley are more than double the threshold above which the EPA considers cancer risk to be unacceptable.
To gather the new data, researchers from Johns Hopkins University drove highly sensitive air monitors along a planned route where a concentration of industrial facilities known to emit ethylene oxide are situated. The monitors detected levels that were as many as 10 times higher than EPA thresholds, and the researchers were able to detect plumes of the toxin spewing from the facilities from as many as seven miles away. The resulting measurements were significantly higher than the EPA and state environmental agency’s modeled emissions values for the area.
“From over two decades of doing these measurements, we’ve always found that the measured concentrations of pretty much every pollutant is higher than what we expect,” said Peter DeCarlo, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University and an author of the study. “In the case of ethylene oxide, this is particularly important because of the health risks associated with it at such low levels.”
There is no safe level of ethylene oxide exposure. The EPA calculates exposure thresholds for various chemicals by assessing the level at which it causes an increased incidence of cancer. For ethylene oxide, the EPA has determined that breathing in nearly 11 parts per trillion of the chemical for a lifetime can result in one additional case of cancer per 10,000 people. The higher the concentration, the higher the risk of cancer.
DeCarlo and his team found that, in three quarters of the regions where they collected data, ethylene oxide levels were above the 11 parts per trillion threshold. On average, the level was roughly 31 parts per trillion. In some extreme cases, they observed area averages above 109 parts per trillion. The findings were published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Environmental Science & Technology. The study was funded in part by Bloomberg Philanthropies, which launched a campaign in 2022 to block the construction and expansion of new petrochemical facilities.
“We definitely saw parts per billion levels at the fence line of some of these facilities, which means people inside the fence line — workers, for example — are getting exposed to much, much higher concentrations over the course of their day,” DeCarlo said.
Ethylene oxide is emitted from petrochemical manufacturing and plants that sterilize medical equipment. Earlier this year, the EPA finalized rules for ethylene oxide emissions from bothtypes of facilities. The rule that applies to the manufacturing facilities in Louisiana requires companies to install monitors and report data to the EPA and state environmental agency. If the monitors record concentrations above a certain “action level,” companies will be required to make repairs. The rule is expected to reduce emissions of ethylene oxide and chloroprene, another toxic chemical, by 80 percent. Companies have two years to comply.
Heather McTeer Toney, who heads the campaign against petrochemical facilities at Bloomberg Philanthropies, told Grist in an email that the new measurements provide a baseline understanding as the EPA’s new regulations take effect. “The EPA’s new rule was necessary but should only be the start of how we begin to make things right here,” she said. “I’m hopeful to see levels go down, but the data suggest we have a long way to go.”
Tracey Woodruff, a professor studying the impact of chemicals on health at the University of California in San Francisco, said that the study “affirms that EPA is doing the right thing to regulate” ethylene oxide and that the agency “needs to improve their modeling data.” The levels identified by the researchers are 9 times higher than those estimated by the EPA’s models.
For residents in the area, the study’s findings confirm their lived experience. Sharon Lavigne, the founder of Rise St. James, a community organization battling the expansion of the petrochemical industry in St. James Parish, told Grist that the study “is a step in the right direction” and helps the community get a deeper understanding of what they’re being exposed to. But ultimately, without accountability and follow-through, monitoring data will do little to help her family and neighbors.
“These monitors are good, but in the meantime, people are dying,” she said.
In the winter of 2010, the photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier strapped knee pads over her leggings and pulled on a pair of Levi’s blue jeans. The denim brand had just opened a popup shop on Wooster Street in lower Manhattan to promote a new clothing line designed around the motif of the “urban pioneer.” For the site of its ad campaign, the company chose Braddock, Pennsylvania, aestheticizing the town’s post-industrial landscape in a series of images plastered across magazine pages and New York billboards, and making it appear as a place in motion with ample economic horizons for any working American. “Go Forth,” one ad instructed the viewer over a black and white image of a horse flanked by two denim-clad supermodels. It couldn’t be further from the truth.
Wearing combat boots, a cap, and thick industrial gloves, Frazier, who was born and raised in Braddock, crouched on the sidewalk outside the Manhattan store and began dragging her lower body back and forth over the pavement, first her thighs, then her knees. The moves were choreographed, taken from footage of steel industry workers on the job, and meant to create a dissonance between Levi’s glossy campaign ads and the reality of life in a mill town after a long period of decline. Frazier’s repeated motions made a rough, scratching sound, and the jeans she’d worn began to fray. By the end of the hour, they were in tatters, hanging from her legs.
The short film documenting the performance, LaToya Ruby Frazier Takes on Levi’s, shot by the visual artist Liz Magic Laser, is currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, part of the exhibit “Monuments of Solidarity,” which showcases more than two decades of Frazier’s work. Themes of deindustrialization, environmental injustice, and unequal health care access are present throughout the photographs on view. From Braddock to Flint, Michigan, during the lead drinking water crisis to Lordstown, Ohio, in the aftermath of the General Motors layoffs, the artist captures communities facing economic declines, not as a single catastrophic event, but as a process initiated by the country’s power brokers and borne by ordinary working-class people. In many towns, what’s primarily left from the industrial past is the pollution, which continues to accumulate in the soil and the water, making people sick even as the hospitals shutter from disinvestment.
What is the purpose of this documentation? Frazier has said that she feels called “to stand in the gap between the working and creative classes,” to use photo-making as a means of resisting “historical erasure and historical amnesia,” symptoms of an economic and political system that discards communities whose labor it no longer deems valuable. She does this by not only taking pictures of working-class people, but also by treating her subjects as “collaborators” and displaying their testimonies alongside their portraits. Some of Frazier’s portraits may look like so much documentary work you’ve seen, but she’s not interested in photography as an isolated or objective act. No art for art’s sake; she invites communities to see themselves in a different way — as historical subjects, as agents in a broader struggle — a step toward believing that they are not powerless.
Louis Robinson, Jr., UAW Local 1714.
LaToya Ruby Frazier; courtesy LaToya Ruby Frazier / Gladstone Gallery
That the awareness of a person’s agency can alter their lived experience is not theoretical. For half a decade, I’ve reported on communities reckoning with legacy pollution and unbridled industrial expansion, and along the way, I’ve found that a deep sense of the past can have a galvanizing effect. To recognize oneself as belonging to a wider context or system is to also imagine a world beyond its daily injustices, one worth fighting for: What if the chemical company built someplace else? What if the district had the resources to offer its children a future?
I saw this firsthand in my home state, Louisiana, where a maze of petrochemical infrastructure clings to the banks of the lower Mississippi River, dumping cancer-causing chemicals into the air and water of predominantly Black towns, some of which were founded by formerly enslaved people more than a century ago. The people of “Cancer Alley” describe the plants as only the most recent installment in a long arc of racial injustice. Plantations once stood on the mammoth tracts of land where companies like Exxon Mobil, Occidental Petroleum, and BASF erected smoke stacks and ethylene crackers. By telling a different story about their communities, and placing themselves at the center of it, local advocates have had some success in challenging proposed industrial projects in court, arguing that building new facilities over the graves of their enslaved ancestors amounts to a violation of their civil rights and the desecration of historic sites.
Before Frazier could open anyone else’s eyes, she started at home. She was 16 when she first picked up a camera and began photographing herself and her family. In an article timed with the opening of “Monuments of Solidarity,” Frazier describes how she once felt a simple, but no less deeply felt, connection to Braddock as the place where she was born and raised. Witnessing its landscape through her camera’s viewfinder changed that relationship: “My spiritual bondage to Braddock was broken the instant light exposed my film’s silver halide crystals as I created “United States Steel Mon Valley Works Edgar Thomson Plant” (2013), hovering over the city with a bird’s-eye view,” she wrote. “Permeating the 21st century postindustrial landscape were the vestiges of imperial war, patriarchy, and the death and destruction of nature.”
“Monuments of Solidarity” opens with these early works, which are part of her collection “The Notion of Family” (2001-2014). Her primary subjects are herself and the matriarchs that raised her, her mother and grandmother. “I was combating stereotypes of someone like my mother and I,” who are often portrayed as “poor, worthless, or on welfare,” she explained in a 2012 documentary about her work. “We find a way to deal with these types of problems on our own through photographing each other.”
Frazier shot the images on black-and-white film using only the available light. The effect is a sense of intimacy, an impression that the women were asked to look up in the middle of what they were doing or feeling. There is her mother, working the bar at a local restaurant, and again, leaning over the sink with her chest exposed, a jagged scar across her breast, the mark of a recent surgery. In Frazier’s emergent story of herself, the town plays a role, too. Images of Braddock’s abandoned buildings, crisscrossing railroad tracks, and faded billboards are interspersed among the portraits. In one such photo, a mural on the side of a building reads: “JESUS SAID! YOU MUST BE BORN AGAIN! OF WATER & SPIRIT.” Amid images of a run-down Braddock, this one serves a dual function, alluding to local officials’ failed attempts at revitalization and affirming that any rebuilding would have to come from the people themselves, the true witnesses of their own experience.
As a storyteller, Frazier doesn’t confine herself to one frame, and frequently uses multiple images to draw connections and offer more complete views of how she sees things. In this mode, Frazier recontextualizes the industrial plant as not just a place to work; she situates it within a broader experience of life. What happens in the plants follows workers into their homes. They suffer the health effects of prolonged chemical exposure. They endure the impacts of job loss.
Edgar Thomson Plant and The Bottom from A Despoliation of Water: From the Housatonic to the Monongahela River (1930-2013), 2013
LaToya Ruby Frazier; courtesy LaToya Ruby Frazier / Gladstone Gallery
In one two-panel work, an image of her mother on a hospital bed is placed beside a photo of a demolition site. The slant of her mother’s body and the rope of wires connected to her skull rhyme with the tangle of rebar and concrete of the crumbling building. A nine-panel series shows Frazier and her mother posing behind a patterned cloth, just their shadows visible. The names of the industrial chemicals in Braddock’s air adorn the wall around the frame: benzene, toluene, chloroform. “Your environment impacts your body, and it shapes how you perceive yourself in the world,” the photographer said in the documentary about her work. And in the triptych “John Frazier, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Andrew Carnegie” (2010), a photo of the artist as a child is set between a historical plaque about John Frazier, a fur trader and frontiersman who aided George Washington in the French and Indian War, and Andrew Carnegie, the industrialist and philanthropist who built Braddock’s first steel factory. With this work, Frazier wrote, she is posing a question: “Weighed against the two colossal Scotsmen that dominate Braddock’s history, what is the value of a Black girl’s life?”
It’s well worth interpreting Frazier’s subsequent work as her own answer to that question. In 2016, she spent five months living in Flint, Michigan, photographing residents as they lived through the worst days of the city’s lead drinking water crisis. Like Braddock, Flint experienced a prolonged deindustrialization crisis, with General Motors slashing its local workforce from 80,000 in 1978 to under 8,000 by 2010. Over the same period, the city’s population nearly halved. The public health emergency started in 2014 after the cash-strapped local government elected to divert the city’s water source from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to the Flint River, causing levels of bacteria and lead in the city’s water supply to spike. While in Flint, Frazier met Shea Cobb, a local poet and activist, and her daughter Zion, whom she would come to document across the three-part series, “Flint Is Family.” Like Frazier’s mother, who helped stage and shoot many of the portraits in Braddock, Cobb became someone who had a say in the work, an artist in her own right.
“Shea Brushing Zion’s Teeth with Bottled Water in Her Bathroom, Flint, Michigan,” Flint is Family in Three Acts, 2016-2017 LaToya Ruby Frazier; courtesy LaToya Ruby Frazier / Gladstone Gallery
Over the years, Frazier followed Cobb and her daughter as they moved in with Cobb’s father in Newton, Mississippi, where they sought refuge from the lead crisis, lived closer to nature, and learned to care for horses. She also photographed the family as they moved back to Flint after Zion experienced discrimination in her Mississippi school. The photographs from Newton and the family’s return to Flint depart from the black and white of Frazier’s earlier photography, creating a sense of vibrancy and forward momentum in spite of the hardships they faced. In perhaps the most striking photograph of the series, Zion poses on a horse, one hand on her hip, flanked by her mother and grandfather, also on horses. The three generations stare down the camera defiantly.
“We laugh sometimes to throw off the frustration,” Cobb said in a text accompanying one of her portraits in the exhibit. “We brush our teeth, we laugh.”
“Zion, Her Mother Shea, and Her Grandfather Mr. Smiley Riding on Their Tennessee Walking Horses, Mares, P.T. (P.T.’s Miss One Of A Kind), Dolly (Secretly), and Blue (Blue’s Royal Threat), Newton, Mississippi” from Flint is Family in Three Acts, 2017-2019 LaToya Ruby Frazier; Courtesy LaToya Ruby Frazier / Gladstone Gallery
In the end, Frazier’s work engages an enduring, if cliche question: Can art change things? On one of her trips to Flint, Frazier learned about the invention of an atmospheric water generator that could supply clean water to the most neglected areas of the city. When local officials indicated that they weren’t interested in the technology, Frazier decided to use funds from an exhibit of her early photos of Flint to pay for the machine’s transportation.
The process is incremental, a slow revealing of places and people once unseen, cast in new light. Can journalism change things?
Each year, nearly 1.3 million households across the country have their electricity shut off because they cannot pay their bill. Beyond risking the health, or even lives, of those who need that energy to power medical devices and inconveniencing people in myriad ways, losing power poses a grave threat during a heat wave or cold snap.
Such disruptions tend to disproportionately impact Black and Hispanic families, a point underscored by a recent study that found customers of Minnesota’s largest electricity utility who live in communities of color were more than three times as likely to experience a shutoff than those in predominantly white neighborhoods. The finding, by University of Minnesota researchers, held even when accounting for income, poverty level, and homeownership.
Energy policy researchers say they consistently see similar racial disparities nationwide, but a lack of empirical data to illustrate the problem is hindering efforts to address the problem. Only 30 states require utilities to report disconnections, and of those, only a handful provide data revealing where they happen. As climate change brings hotter temperatures, more frequent cold snaps, and other extremes in weather, energy analysts and advocates for disadvantaged communities say understanding these disparities and providing equitable access to reliable power will become ever more important.
“The energy system as it is currently designed is failing to adequately serve all customers,” said Shelby Green, a researcher with the nonprofit Energy and Policy Institute. “Economically disadvantaged and minority people’s lives will be the ones most at threat.”
The research in Minnesota, led by Bhavin Pradhan and Gabriel Chan, found that households of color served by Xcel Energy experienced disproportionately more shutoffs and more frequent outages. Between 2020 and 2022, neighborhoods with the highest concentration of people of color were 47 percent more likely than other areas to lose power for more than half a day.
Pradhan told Grist he was surprised to find that those racial differences held even over a period of several years. “It wasn’t just one year where there was a spike, but consistently over time,” he said. The team analyzed data for groups of a few hundred households from 2017 to 2022 — a level of spatial detail that allowed them to isolate the effect of race at a neighborhood level. Xcel Energy has noted that its own grid equity analysis found similar racial disparities in shutoffs and outages. But the utility highlighted the age of a home as an equally significant factor for extended outages, and largely attributed cutoffs to a customer’s income. In a submission to the public utilities commission, the company noted that “disconnections are correlated with poverty, and — for a variety of deeply entrenched economic and social reasons that are not driven by the energy system — poverty is correlated with race.” It added that the utility offers programs to help customers cover their bills.
Erica McConnell, staff attorney at the Environmental Law and Policy Center, countered that the utility’s own disconnection data proves those efforts are insufficient. Xcel Energy is currently updating a five-year plan outlining future grid investments, a process McConnell says provides an opportunity for the utility and regulators to invest in communities disproportionately impacted by disconnections and outages. The Center and other organizations have also called on the state Public Utilities Commission to consider reinstating a moratorium on disconnections, introduced at the height of the pandemic, until it can determine how best to address these disparities.
One potential measure that could help is expanding community solar, battery storage, and other distributed energy resources. The University of Minnesota study found that the communities bearing an outsized burden of disconnections and outages also have the greatest capacity to host small-scale clean energy projects like rooftop solar — a point McConnell echoed.
“Historically, a lot of communities haven’t had access to those kinds of programs,” she said. In the long term, distributed energy resources that “encourage ownership by the communities and wealth-building could be a valuable way to address the issue” by ensuring residents have access to cheap, reliable power.
Green, the researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute, noted that rather than simply pointing to broader issues, utilities like Xcel Energy should look at how their operations might be perpetuating or amplifying existing inequities.
Minnesota’s study is one of a few that have documented the role race plays in shutoffs. In Illinois, researchers found that from 2018 through 2019, electricity customers in predominantly Black and Hispanic zip codes were four times more likely to be disconnected than other areas, even when accounting for income and other factors. A national survey by researchers at Indiana University reached a similar conclusion: between April 2019 and May 2020, researchers found that Black and Hispanic households were roughly twice as likely to have their power shut off compared to white households.
Those studying energy insecurity aren’t sure exactly what causes so strong a correlation between race and shutoffs. Sanya Carley, a professor and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, cites two possible factors. One is energy burden, or the proportion of a household’s income spent on gas and electricity. The other is the age of their housing, since older buildings tend to be less energy efficient. But her team’s research has found that those reasons account for only around 10 percent of the racial disparities found in utility disconnections.
“There is something left unexplained about the energy experiences of Black and Hispanic households that needs to be identified to fully understand the prevalence of energy insecurity in these groups,” the study authors wrote. Green suggested another factor could be implicit bias in utility operations. A customer service representative, for example, could respond less leniently to a customer living in a community of color or low-income area. But overwhelmingly, energy policy experts told Grist that more data is needed to understand the extent of racial inequities and the forces driving them. Carley noted that unless required by law, most utilities don’t voluntarily share data on disconnections. Just six states, including Minnesota, Illinois, and California, require location data on utility shutoffs, typically at the zip code level. In most others that require reporting, utilities often share only the total number of disconnections each year. What’s more, those laws apply only to regulated investor-owned utilities, meaning municipal utilities or co-ops may not share any data at all.
Energy justice advocates have long called for widespread requirements for utilities to report on disconnections and who they impact. Pradhan, the co-author of Minnesota’s study, told Grist that access to such data could enable “more studies and more data-driven decisionmaking” on where and how utilities should invest in improving their grid and electricity service.
More urgently, Carley, Green, and others say consumer protections against disconnections can shield households from the brunt of life-threatening cutoffs. Already, 41 states prevent or limit utilities from disconnecting customers during bouts of extreme cold. But only 20 states, including Minnesota, have restrictions against shut-offs during periods of extreme heat — though that is beginning to change. After a deadly 2021 heat dome across the Pacific Northwest, lawmakers in Washington passed a law last summer preventing utilities from cutting off power to customers on days when a heat-related alert is issued.
“Power and water can be a matter of life and death during a heat wave,” Washington State Representative Sharlett Mena said at the time. “This legislation will ensure that every Washingtonian has the ability to protect themselves against extreme heat.”
