This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. One year on from the Eaton Fire, long after the vicious winds that sent embers cascading from the San Gabriel mountains and the flames that swallowed entire streets, a shadow still hangs over Altadena. Construction on new properties is under way, and families whose homes survived the fire have begun to return. But many are grappling with an urgent question: is it safe to be here? The fire upended life in this part of Los Angeles county. By the time firefighters brought it under control, 19 people were dead, tens of thousands displaced and nearly 9,500 structures destroyed, primarily in Altadena but also in Pasadena and Sierra Madre. Guardian graphic. Fire extent source: Cal Fire. Building damage source: analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University. Using building data from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and fire perimeters from NIFC/FIRIS. All times are localGuardian graphic. Fire extent source: Cal Fire. Building damage source: analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University. Using building data from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and fire perimeters from NIFC/FIRIS. Note: all times are local The flames incinerated many older homes and businesses filled with lead paint and asbestos. They showered the community with toxins, leaving tall piles of ash and unseen traces of heavy metals in the soil and along and inside standing structures. Research has indicated some hazards remain even after properties have undergone remediation, the clean-up process that is supposed to restore homes and ensure they are safe to occupy. As Altadena fights to return, residents—some eager to stay in the community and others who simply can’t afford to go anywhere else—are facing immense challenges while trying to rebuild their lives and come back home. Official information about the health risks was limited early on and those returning often only learned about the dangers as they went. Some people have developed health concerns such as migraines and respiratory issues. Many are still battling their insurance companies to fully cover their costs, and make certain their homes are habitable. Their predicament highlights the increased dangers that come with urban fires, and shows how Altadena has come to serve as a sort of living laboratory with scientists and residents learning in real time. Nicole Maccalla, a data scientist, and her family moved back into their Altadena home over the summer after their property underwent an extensive cleanup process, but their air purifiers still register high levels of particulate matter, heavy sediment appears when they vacuum and when it rains the distinctive smell from the fire returns. “The toll of displacement was really high on my family. And I just had to move home and try [to] mitigate risk and keep fighting the good fight,” she said. “There’s always that back-of-your-mind concern: Did I make the right choice? But I also don’t have other choices.” Early on in those first careening hours of the fire, as thick smoke and ash fell like snow over her yard, Dawn Fanning was sure her home would not be spared. The wind was blowing from the fire straight to the Spanish bungalow the producer shared with her adult son, and it seemed there was no way to stop it. Dawn Fanning outside her home in Pasadena, California, on December 28 2025. The interior of her home has been found to have lead and asbestos after the Eaton Fire.Stella Kalinina/Guardian Fanning’s home, miraculously, escaped the flames. But, while the stucco structure was intact—clothes still hanging undisturbed in her closet and her son’s baby photos packed carefully in bins in the garage—it hadn’t been unscathed either. Virtually nothing in Altadena was. “It’s dusty and there’s piles of ash in the windowsills and on the floor. At first glance, it doesn’t look any different,” Fanning said. “Your house looks the same—but it’s not. There’s toxicity in your attic and in your crawlspace and on your mattresses and on all the things.” Confused and frustrated with the local government’s handling of health concerns, Maccalla and Fanning joined other fire survivors to form Eaton Fire Residents United in hopes of ensuring the impacted areas recover safely. The community group is developing testing and remediation guidelines, gathered hygienic testing reports of hundreds of homes, and advocated for fire survivors and workers. > “When she awoke at 3 a.m., the blaze had formed a horseshoe shape around her > house, and smoke filled the room.” “There [have been] huge threats to the health and safety of residents, children in schools, elderly and immunocompromised, workers that are coming into this area that are being exposed to hazards in the workplace,” Maccalla said. “We’re still trying to work on that and get the protections people need.” Barely 15 miles north-east of downtown Los Angeles, Altadena at the start of last year was home to some 43,000 people, many lured by the affordable home prices, proximity to the mountains and bucolic feel. It has long been one of the most diverse cities in the region with a thriving Black community that began to grow during the great migration. In the early evening on January 7 2025, Fanning, who had lived in her home in the area for two decades, had a feeling she couldn’t shake that something could go very wrong. There were treacherous winds that forecasters warned posed a serious fire risk. Already, a fire was spreading rapidly on the other side of the county in the Pacific Palisades, where frantic residents were trying to evacuate and firefighters were clearing the area. Some 35 miles away, Fanning and her son were watching coverage of the unfolding fire while readying their property. Then came an alert—not from officials—but from a local meteorologist who was telling his followers to get out now. Fanning spotted flames several blocks away and she and her son decided it was time to leave. A few miles to the east, Rosa Robles was evacuating with her grandchild in tow, leaving her husband and adult children. She wanted them to go—but they were protecting the home. Armed with garden hoses, they tried to save the residence and the other houses on their block. Sometimes the wind was so strong it blew the water back in their faces, Robles said. Maccalla’s power had gone out that morning, and she and her children were sitting around watching the TV drama Fire Country on an iPad in the dark when they got the call about the fire. It seemed far away at the time, Maccalla recalled, and she felt prepared as a member of a community emergency response team. They got out lamps and began packing in case they needed to leave. She set alarms hourly to monitor the progress of the fire while her children slept. When she awoke at three, the blaze had formed a horseshoe shape around her house, and smoke filled the room. The family evacuated with their two dogs and two cats. Tamara Artin had returned from work to see chaos on the street, with fierce winds and billowing smoke all around the house she rented with her husband. Artin, who is Armenian by way of Iran and has lived in Los Angeles for about six years, always loved the area. She enjoyed the history and sprawling green parks, and had been excited to live here. Now the pair was quickly abandoning the home they had moved into just three months earlier, heading toward a friend’s house with their bags and passports. Fanning and her son had gone to a friend’s home too. As they stayed up late listening to the police scanner, they heard emergency responders call out addresses where flames were spreading. These were friends’ homes. She waited to hear her own. > “We were worried, of course, because we were inhaling all those chemicals > without knowing what it is.” In the first days after the fire began, the risk remained and there was little help available with firefighting resources spread across Los Angeles. Maccalla and her son soon returned to their property to try to protect their home and those of their neighbors. “I was working on removing a bunch of debris that had flown into the yard and all these dry leaves. I didn’t know at the time that I shouldn’t touch any of that,” she said.” The devastation in Altadena, as in the Palisades, was staggering. Many of the 19 people who died were older adults who hadn’t received evacuation warnings for hours after people in other areas of town, if at all. Physically, parts of Altadena were almost unrecognizable. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, bright red flame retardant streaked the hillsides. Off Woodbury Road, not far from where Robles and Artin lived, seemingly unblemished homes stood next to blackened lots where nothing remained but fireplaces and charred rubble—scorched bicycles, collapsed beds and warped ovens. The pungent smell of smoke seemed to embed itself in the nose. Robles would sometimes get lost in the place she had lived her whole life as she tried to navigate streets that had been stripped of any identifiable landmarks. Fire scorched the beloved community garden, the country club, an 80-year-old hardware store, the Bunny Museum and numerous schools and houses of worship. Artin and her husband returned to their home, which still stood, after a single night. They had no family in the area and nowhere else to go—hotels were packed across the county. For nearly two weeks they lived without water or power as they tried to clean up, throwing away most of their furniture and belongings, even shoes, and all of the food in the fridge and freezer. “We were worried, of course, because we were inhaling all those chemicals without knowing what it is, but we didn’t have a choice,” Artin recalled. As fires burn through communities, they spread particulate matter far and wide, cause intense smoke damage in standing structures and cars, and release chemicals even miles beyond the burned area. > After one round of remediation, “six out of 10 homes were still coming back > with lead and or asbestos levels that exceeded EPA safety thresholds.” When Fanning saw her home for the first time, thick piles of ash covered the floors. She was eager to return, but as she tried to figure out her next steps, reading scientific articles and guides, and joining Zoom calls with other concerned residents, it was clear she needed to learn more about precisely what was in the ash. Asbestos was found in her home, meaning all porous items, clothing and furniture, were completely ruined. “You can’t wash lead and asbestos out of your clothing. I was like, OK, this is real and I need to gather as much evidence [as I can] to find out what’s in my house.” In Altadena, more than 90 percent of homes had been built before 1975 and likely had lead-based paint and toxic asbestos, both of which the EPA has since banned, according to a report from the California Institute of Technology. All sorts of things burned along with the houses, Fanning said: plastic, electric cars, lithium batteries. “The winds were shoving this into our homes,” she said. The roof on Maccalla’s home had to be rebuilt, and significant cleanup was required for the smoke damage and layers of ash that blanketed curtains and beds. Despite these concerns, residents grew increasingly frustrated about what they viewed as a lack of official information about the safety of returning to their homes. Many also encountered pushback from their insurance providers that said additional testing for hazards, or more intensive remediation efforts recommended by experts, were unnecessary and not covered under their policies. So earlier this year a group of residents, including Fanning and Maccalla, formed Eaton Fire Residents United (EFRU). The group includes scientists and people dedicated to educating and supporting the community, ensuring there is data collection to support legislation, and assembling an expert panel to establish protocols for future fires, Fanning said. They’ve published research based on testing reports from hundreds of properties across the affected area, and advocated that homes should receive a comprehensive clearance before residents return. Research released by EFRU and headed by Maccalla, who has a doctorate in education and specializes in research methodology, found that more than half of homes that had been remediated still had levels of lead and/or asbestos that rendered them uninhabitable. “There’s still widespread contamination and that one round of remediation was not sufficient, the majority of the time. Six out of 10 homes were still coming back with lead and or asbestos levels that exceeded EPA safety thresholds,” said Maccalla, who serves as EFRU’S director of data science and educational outreach. The interior of Dawn Fanning’s home has been found to have lead and asbestos after the Eaton Fire.Stella Kalinina/The Guardian Maccalla moved back home in June after what she viewed as a decent remediation process. But she hasn’t been able to get insurance coverage for additional testing, and worries about how many people are having similar experiences. “We’re putting people back in homes without confirming that they’re free of contamination,” she said. “It feels very unethical and a very dangerous game to be playing.” She couldn’t afford not to come home, and the family couldn’t keep commuting two hours a day each way from their temporary residence to work and school or their Altadena property where Maccalla was overseeing construction. But she’s experienced headaches, her daughter’s asthma is more severe, and her pets have become sick. “I don’t think anybody that hasn’t gone through it can really comprehend what [that is like],” she said. “For everything in your environment that was so beloved to now become a threat is mentally a really hard switch,” she said. Robles settled back to the home she’s lived in for years with a few new additions. Seven of her relatives lost their homes, including her daughter who now lives with her. “I thank God there’s a place for them. That’s all that matters to me.” Nicole Maccalla with her dog, Cami, outside her home in Altadena. Stella Kalinina/The Guardian After the fire, she threw away clothes, bed sheets and pillows. The family mopped and washed the walls. Her insurance was helpful, she said, and covered the cleanup work. Robles tries not to think about the toxic contamination and chemicals that spread during the fire. “You know that saying, what you don’t know?” she said, her voice trailing off. Artin said she received some assistance from her renter’s insurance, but that her landlord hadn’t yet undertaken more thorough remediation. She’s still trying to replace some of the furniture she had to throw away. The fire had come after an already difficult year in which her husband had been laid off, and their finances were stretched. > “I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe again.” She shudders when she recalls the early aftermath of the fire, a morning sky as dark as night. “It was hell, honestly.” Her rent was set to increase in the new year, and while she fears exposure to unseen dangers, moving isn’t an option. “We don’t have anywhere else to go. We can’t do anything,” Artin said. Fanning has been battling her insurance company to cover the work that is necessary to ensure her house is safely habitable, she said. Her provider is underplaying the amount of work that needs to be done and underbidding the costs, Fanning said. She and her son have been living in a short-term rental since late summer, and she expects they won’t be able to return home before the fall. Sometimes she wonders if she’ll be up to returning at all. Even now, when Fanning drives through the area to come get her mail or check on the house, she gets headaches. “I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe, no matter all the things that I know and all the things that I’m gonna do. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe again.” In between trying to restore her home, she’s focused on advocacy with EFRU, which has become her primary job, albeit unpaid. “There are so many people that don’t have enough insurance coverage, that don’t speak English, that are renters, that don’t have access like I do … I feel it’s my duty as a human.” There’s much work to do, Fanning said, and it has to be done at every single property. “It’s a long road to recovery. And if we don’t do it right, safely, it’s never gonna be what it was before.”

On Tuesday, California voters passed Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s congressional redistricting proposal in response to Texas Republicans’ gerrymandered map, by a sweeping 28-point margin. As I reported in October, high-profile Democratic politicians—including former President Barack Obama—were front and center in an advertising blitz to pass the measure, which would tilt five seats in the House of Representatives towards Democrats. But on the ground in California, often with less media coverage, were legions of campaigners with civil rights and racial justice organizations, many of which tirelessly championed Prop 50 in the final weeks before the election—and are now celebrating its passage as a small step in the long fight for Black political representation. > “We understood that it was critical to counter what Donald Trump was trying to > do in Texas.” “There has been a long and steady march to kind of erode our voting rights,” said Phaedra Jackson, NAACP’s vice president of unit advocacy and effectiveness, reflecting on the conservative Supreme Court’s continuing attacks on the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 2013, the Court eliminated the formula for preclearance, the mechanism by which the VRA prevented certain states and localities from passing discriminatory election laws; six years later, another ruling enabled partisan gerrymandering on a hugely expanded scale. In the years since, the turnout gap between white voters and voters of color has grown—and it’s done so nearly twice as fast in counties that were previously subject to preclearance, according to the progressive nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice. “A lot of folks have framed this as a partisan issue,” Jackson said. “We see it [as] an attack on the ability for Black folks and folks of color to actually have representation.” “You see what’s happened in Missouri, in Texas,” she added, pointing to states where minority representatives, such as Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver and Texas Reps. Marc Veasey, Jasmine Crockett, and Joaquin Castro, all Democrats, were drawn out of their districts, and where the voting power of Black and Latino communities is being diluted. While local chapters of the organization continue to challenge the constitutionality of those maps in court, its goal in California “is to be a counterbalance.” That’s what led the NAACP, in the weeks leading up to the election, to become one of the measure’s biggest direct supporters, including by door-knocking and deploying hundreds of poll monitors across the state. The California Black Power Network, a coalition of 46 grassroots organizations across 15 counties, entered the fray later in the cycle. “We understood that it was critical to counter what Donald Trump was trying to do in Texas,” said Kevin Cosney, the coalition’s chief program officer. But the group waited until it could review the proposed new map—and judge its impact on Black voter representation—before entering the campaign.  Although Proposition 50 would mean 48 of California’s 52 House seats would now likely go to Democrats, the geographic and racial representation of its map is similar to the previous one drawn by the state’s independent redistricting committee, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. When it was convinced that Black voter representation and seats historically held by Black representatives were secure, the coalition’s members reached a consensus to support the measure through phone banking, canvassing, community events and ads.  For Newsom, and many of the measure’s backers in Sacramento, Prop 50’s massive success means it’s time to chalk a win. For racial justice campaigners like Jackson, it’s just “triaging a hemorrhaging situation”—even now, the Supreme Court is considering a Louisiana case that’s likely to further erode voting rights—that needs “long-term systemic fixes” like the decade-old John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which was reintroduced in Congress this summer. Cosney echoed the need for systemic change. While Prop 50 “sets the stage for what is potentially possible,” he said, “we still have to organize and do the work … to make sure that those districts that have been built out are filled by folks who have our best interest in mind.” “This was the kind of first opportunity that Californians really had to swing back,” said Cosney. “But it’s not the last.”

On Wednesday, former President Barack Obama joined California Gov. Gavin Newsom in a livestream for volunteers in support of Proposition 50, the governor’s redistricting measure, and the sole question on the ballot in the November 4 special election. As I reported last week in a story on the almost unprecedented spending around the measure: > Prop 50 is part of a larger redistricting fight unfolding across the country, > as Democrats seek to retake the House of Representatives and Republicans try > to retain their narrow majority in next year’s midterm elections. It all began > in June, when President Donald Trump nudged Texas Republicans to redraw the > state’s voting maps mid-decade, off the usual 10-year schedule, to swing five > seats in the national party’s favor. “This is in reaction to something unprecedented,” Newsom said at the start of Wednesday’s call. Proposition 50, Newsom said, is his attempt to counter Republican efforts to redraw congressional lines at the president’s behest, not just in Texas but in other states—like Indiana, Missouri, and North Carolina—with GOP-run legislatures.  Obama, the highest-profile of many Democratic political notables to throw their weight behind the measure, joined midway through the call to drive home Newsom’s message.  “The problem that we are seeing right now,” Obama said, is that Trump and his administration are brazenly saying that they want to “change the rules of the game midstream” to “give themselves an advantage.”  “This is not how American democracy is supposed to operate. And that’s what Prop 50 is about,” he added, noting that the measure “has critical implications not just for California but for the entire country.” “As a consequence of California’s actions, we have a chance at least to create a level playing field in the upcoming midterm elections,” he said.  This comes days after Obama featured in the Yes on 50 campaign’s latest ad, and the same day that the Washington Post released a report about how the former president has been advocating for the measure behind the scenes since the summer.  As part of Saturday’s No Kings demonstrations, thousands of Bay Area protesters at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach showed their support for the proposal and opposition to Trump’s authoritarian policies by forming a human banner that read, “NO KINGS,” and below that, “YES ON 50.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Gavin Newsom vetoed a California bill that was set to ban the sale of cookware and other consumer goods manufactured with PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” human-made compounds linked to a range of health issues. The governor’s decision on Monday followed months of debate and advocacy, including from high-profile celebrity chefs such as Thomas Keller and Rachael Ray, who argued that nonstick cookware made with PFAS, when manufactured responsibly, can be safe and effective and urged lawmakers to vote against the proposal. Newsom said in a statement that the legislation was “well-intentioned” but would affect too broad a swath of products and would result in a “sizable and rapid shift” of cooking products available in the state. “I am deeply concerned about the impact this bill would have on the availability of affordable options in cooking products,” Newsom wrote, adding that the state “must carefully consider” the consequences of a dramatic shift in available products. Concerns over the use of PFAS, chemicals used to make cookware and other items non-stick and water-resistant, have grown significantly in recent years. Called “forever chemicals,” because they do not break down naturally, PFAS are used in non-stick cookware, waterproof mascara and dental floss, among other items. They have been linked to a number of health issues, with some linked to high cholesterol, reproductive issues and cancer. A United States Geological Survey study in 2023 detected the chemicals in almost half the country’s tap water. Under the bill approved by California’s legislature, the state by 2030 would have banned the sale or distribution of goods, including cleaning products, cookware, floss, food packaging and ski wax, with “intentionally added” PFAS. The bill had the support of major environmental groups, as well as opposition from influential figures, such as Ray and Keller, and high-profile chefs who argued it would place an unfair burden on restaurants. Ray argued the focus should be on educating consumers rather than eliminating the products. “Removing access to these products without providing fact-based context could hurt the very people we’re trying to protect,” Ray said. Ben Allen, the state senator who introduced the legislation, told the Los Angeles Times he planned to keep working on the issue. “We are obviously disappointed,” he told the newspaper. “We know there are safer alternatives—[but] I understand there were strong voices on both sides on this topic.” Over the weekend, Newsom also vetoed legislation focused on racial justice, including a bill that would allowed universities to give the descendants of enslaved people preference in admissions preference, while approving funding for a reparations study. He also signed a bill allowing a wide range of family members to care for children if the federal government deports their parents.

If you live in California, like me, chances are you’ve been inundated with political ads and have a recycling bin filled up with mailers urging you to vote for or against Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s redistricting proposal in response to Texas’ newly gerrymandered congressional map.  Prop 50 is part of a larger redistricting fight unfolding across the country, as Democrats seek to retake the House of Representatives and Republicans try to retain their narrow majority in next year’s midterm elections. It all began in June, when President Donald Trump nudged Texas Republicans to redraw the state’s voting maps mid-decade, off the usual 10-year schedule, to swing five seats in the national party’s favor.  In response—and after the Texas GOP quashed Democratic opposition with threats of arrest—Newsom unveiled a proposal to counter Trump’s plans to rig the race.  “We have got to fight fire with fire,” Newsom said when announcing his plan to circumvent the state’s independent redistricting process and offset Texas’ gains with a map that would likely flip the same number of red seats blue. Since 2010, California’s congressional maps have been drawn by a nonpartisan 14-member commission of citizens. If Prop 50 were to pass, the state would adopt gerrymandered maps until the 2030 census, after which it would revert to the old model.  Since it was certified for the ballot in late August, Prop 50 has already become one of the most expensive ballot measures in California’s history, drawing about $140 million in spending for and against with weeks remaining until the November 4 special election. More than twice as much—some $97.7 million—has gone to the Yes on 50 campaign. While tens of millions of dollars have been raised from small donors and labor unions, the largest contributions, about $11 million, came from the House Majority PAC, focused on electing Democrats to office, followed by $10 million from the Fund for Policy Reform, a lobbying group funded by billionaire Democratic donor George Soros. Of the more than $42 million raised for the No campaign, the majority—$32 million—comes from conservative megadonor Charles Munger Jr., who helped former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger establish the state’s nonpartisan Citizens Redistricting Commission in the late aughts and has donated to anti-abortion and anti-LGBT groups. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, and Republican former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy have also contributed $5 million and $1 million, respectively. In one Munger-funded No on 50 ad with half a million views on YouTube, local politicians and faith leaders claim the measure will destroy California’s “reputation as a national leader for fair elections” and sacrifice “fair elections and voter choice.” On the flip side, Yes on 50 ads featuring Gov. Newsom and California Sen. Alex Padilla, and well-known national Democrats including New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and most recently, former president Barack Obama, insist that the new map is needed to “protect democracy.” > As the 2026 midterms approach, ad spending is projected to reach a record > $10.8 billion, with California leading at an estimated $1.1 billion. In one ad, Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett draws a straight line between her home and the Golden State, telling California voters, “When Donald Trump ordered Texas Republicans to rig the next election, they drew my seat off the map…With Prop 50, you have the power to stop them.” As the 2026 midterms approach, ad spending is projected to reach a record $10.8 billion, with California leading the states at an estimated $1.1 billion in spending this cycle, according to an August report by AdImpact. A Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS) poll conducted in mid-August, before the ad blitz, surveyed nearly 5,000 registered voters—about 48 percent of whom said they would support Prop 50, with 32 percent against and the remaining 20 percent undecided. “This will be an intense campaign with both sides spending tens of millions to try to move those undecided voters,” IGS co-director Eric Schickler predicted in a press release at the time.  A poll of nearly 1,000 likely voters conducted by the research company Co/efficient about a month later found that 54 percent of those polled supported the proposition, 36 percent opposed it, and only 10 percent were still undecided. By comparison, campaigns around California’s most expensive ballot measures—Propositions 26 and 27, a 2022 pair of measures on legalizing sports betting, and Prop 22, a 2020 proposal about whether to recognize rideshare drivers as independent contractors or employees—received more than $463 and $224 million, respectively. While efforts to pass those measures were bankrolled by major corporations with deep pockets, Prop 50 is unusual: it isn’t about the profits of one industry or a few firms, but who will hold the reins of federal government. While Texas’ new map faces challenges in federal court, and Californians wait to cast their ballots, the midterms—and Congress—hang in the balance. Additional data analysis by Melissa Lewis.

Bill McKibben isn’t known for his rosy outlook on climate change. Back in 1989, he wrote The End of Nature, which is considered the first mainstream book warning of global warming’s potential effects on the planet. Since then, he’s been an ever-present voice on environmental issues, routinely sounding the alarm about how human activity is changing the planet while also organizing protests against the fossil fuel industries that are contributing to climate change. McKibben’s stark and straightforward foreboding about the future of the planet was once described as “dark realism.” But he has recently let a little light shine through thanks to the dramatic growth of renewable energy, particularly solar power. In his new book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, McKibben argues that the planet is experiencing the fastest energy transition in history from fossil fuels to solar and wind—and that transition could be the start of something big. “We’re not talking salvation here,” McKibben says. “We’re not talking stopping global warming. But we are talking the first thing that’s happened in the 40 years that we’ve known about climate change that scales to at least begin taking a serious bite out of the trouble we’re in.” On this week’s More To The Story, McKibben sits down with host Al Letson to examine the rise of solar power, how China is leapfrogging the United States in renewable energy use, and the real reason the Trump administration is trying to kill solar and wind projects around the country. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: Bill, how are you this morning? Bill McKibben: I’m actually pretty darn good, which one feels bad about saying in the midst of planetary ecological trauma and the collapse of our democracy, but it’s a beautiful day in the mountains of Vermont and in the midst of all that bad stuff, I’ve got one piece of big good news, which it’s actually kind of fun to share. Yeah, I think in the midst of all the stress and pressure and sadness about the way the world is heading at this moment, I think having joy is a revolutionary act and it’s good. I think when you come outside and the sun is shining and it feels good outside, I don’t know. I don’t think we should be ashamed of it. I think we should bask it and hold onto it as long as possible because good Lord, who knows what’s next? Amen. One of the results of having spent my whole life working on climate change is I never take good weather for granted. If there’s a snowstorm, I make the most out of every flake. If there’s a beautiful cool fall-like morning like there was today, nobody’s out in it quicker than me. So I take your point 100%. How long have you been working in the field of environmental justice and thinking about the environment? Al, when I was 27, I wrote a book called The End of Nature, so this would’ve been 1989 because I’m an old person. So, wrote a book called The End of Nature that was the first book about what we now call the climate crisis, what we then call the greenhouse effect. And that book, well, that book did well, it came out in 24 languages and things, but more to the point, it just made me realize that this was not only the most important question in the world, what was going to happen to the Earth’s climate, but the most interesting, that it required some understanding of science, but also more importantly of economics, of politics, of sociology, of psychology, of theology, of pretty much everything you could imagine. And so for 38 years now, I guess, it’s been my work and at some level, I wish I’d been able to spend my life on something not quite so bleak. On the other hand, I have to confess, I haven’t been bored in any point in there. Yeah. How would you describe the environmental causes in America since you’ve been watching it for so long? It seems to me that there’s a lot of one step forward, three steps back, one step forward, three steps back. I’d say it’s been more like one step forward, three quarters of a step back over and over again. And that’s a big problem because it’s not only that we have to move, it’s that we have to move fast. Climate change is really probably the first great question we’ve ever come up against that has time limit. As long as I’ve been alive and as long as you’ve been alive, our country’s been arguing over should we have national healthcare? I think we should. I think it’s a sin that we don’t, people are going to die and go bankrupt every year that we don’t join all the other countries of the world in offering it, but it’s not going to make it harder to do it when we eventually elect Bernie and set our minds to it than if we hadn’t delayed all this time. Climate change isn’t like that. Once you melt the Arctic, nobody has a plan for how you freeze it back up again. So we’re under some very serious time pressure, which is why it’s incredibly sad to watch our country pretty much alone among the world in reverse right now on the most important questions. Yeah. Is that forward movement and regression tied to our politics, i.e., is it tied to a specific party? If the Democrats are in office, we move forward, if Republicans come in office, we move backwards? Yeah, in the largest terms. The fossil fuel industry, more or less purchased the Republican Party 30, 35 years ago. Their biggest contributors have been the Koch brothers who are also the biggest oil and gas barons in America. And so it’s just been become party doctrine to pretend that physics and chemistry don’t really exist and we don’t have to worry about them. Democrats have been better, and in the case of Joe Biden actually, considerably better. His Inflation Reduction Act was the one serious attempt that America’s ever made to deal with the climate crisis, and it was far from perfect, and there were plenty of Democrats like Joe Manchin that got in the way and so on and so forth. But all in all, it was a good faith effort driven by extraordinary activism around the Green New Deal. And it’s a shame to see it now thrown into reverse in the Trump administration, especially because the rest of the world is at different paces, some of them very fast, starting to do the right thing here. So given all of that where we are and kind of stepping back away from the progress we had made forward, you just wrote a new book that is pretty optimistic, which is a little bit different for you because you’ve been described as dark realism. Tell me why are you feeling optimistic in this moment? About 36 months ago, the planet began an incredible surge of installation of renewable energy, solar panels, wind turbines, and the batteries to store that power when the sun goes down or the wind drops. That surge is not just the fastest energy transition play on the planet now. It’s the fastest energy transition in history and by a lot, and the numbers are frankly kind of astonishing. I mean, the last month we have good data for is May. In China, in May, they were putting up three gigawatts of solar panels a day. Now, a gigawatt is the rough equivalent of a big coal-fired power plant. So they were building the equivalent of one of those worth of solar panels every eight hours across China. Those kind of numbers are world-changing if we play it out for a few more years, and if everybody joins in. And you can see the same thing happening in parts of this country. California has not done everything right, but it’s done more right than most places, and California has hit some kind of tipping point in the last 11 or 12 months. Now, most days, California generates more than a hundred percent of the electricity it uses from clean energy, which means that at night, when the sun goes down, the biggest source of supply on their grid is batteries that didn’t exist three years ago. And the bottom line is a 40% fall in fossil fuel use for electricity in the fourth-largest economy in the world is the kind of number that, adopted worldwide, begins to shave tenths of a degree off how hot the planet eventually gets. And we know that every 10th of a degree Celsius, that the temperature rises, moves another a hundred million of our brothers and sisters out of a safe climate zone and into a dangerous one. We’re not talking salvation here, we’re not talking stopping global warming, but we are talking the first thing that’s happened in the 40 years that we’ve known about climate change, that scales to at least begin taking a serious bite out of the trouble we’re in. Yeah, so I own a home in Jacksonville, Florida. In the Sunshine State. In the Sunshine State. I was planning on getting solar panels for the house, but then I was told A, one, it would be really expensive, and then B, it wouldn’t save me that much on my bill because of the way some local ordinances are configured. And so for me, somebody who wants to have solar panels and wants to use solar power, it’s just not cost-effective. So how do we get past that? Well, there’s a lot of ways. One of the ways was what Biden was doing in the IRA, which was to offer serious tax credits. And those, despite the Republican defeat of them, remain in effect through the end of this year through New Year’s Eve. So if people move quickly, they can still get those. Probably more important in the long run, and this was the subject of a long piece I wrote for Mother Jones this summer, we need serious reform in the way that we permit and license these things. Putting solar panels on your roof in Florida is roughly three times more expensive than it is to put solar panels on your roof in say, Australia, to pick someplace with a similar climate, or Europe, someplace with a more difficult climate, costs three times as much here. A little bit of that’s because of tariffs on panels. Mostly it’s because every municipality in America, they send out their own team of inspectors, permits, on and on and on. It’s a bureaucratic mess, and that’s what drives the price up so dramatically. There’s actually an easy way to do it. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory developed a piece of software called the Solar App Plus that allows contractors to just plug in the name of the type of equipment they’re going to put on the roof and the address that they’re doing it, and the computer quickly checks to see if it’s all compatible, and if it is, they get an instantaneous permit and get to work right away. And then, for apartment dwellers, because there’s almost as many apartment dwellers as homeowners in this country, who don’t have access to their own roof usually, we need another set of easy technology. We’re calling this balcony solar. And across Europe over the last three years, three and a half, 4 million apartment dwellers have gone to whatever you call Best Buy in Frankfurt or Brussels and come home for a few hundred euros with solar panel design just to be hung from the railing of a apartment balcony and then plugged directly into the wall. No electrician needed nothing. That’s illegal every place in this country except that progressive bastion in the state of Utah where the state legislature unanimously passed enabling legislation earlier this year because some Libertarian Republican state senator who I’ve talked to, an interesting guy, he said, “Well, if people in Stuttgart can have it, why not people in Provo?” And no one had a good reason, so now there’s on YouTube lots of videos of Happy Utahns putting up their balcony solar arrays. So let me just to clarify that because I never heard of this before. In overseas, in different countries, they can go to, I don’t know, an Ikea and grab a solar panel, come home and plug it in the wall to power their apartment? It often powers 25% of the power that they’re using in their apartment. It’s a real amazing thing and it’s for a few hundred euros. And among other things, it really introduces people to the joy of all this. There was a big story in The Guardian a few months ago following all sorts of people who’d done this and almost to a person, they’d all become fascinated by the app on their phone showing how much power they were generating at any given moment. Solar power is kind of a miracle. It exists in so many different sizes, from your balcony to big solar farms, all of which we need. But the thing that’s a miracle about it is precisely that it’s available to all of us. I mean, no one’s going to build a coal-fired power plant on their balcony. This is something that everybody can do, and it’s something that once you’ve got the panel, no one can control. We’re talking about energy that can’t be hoarded, that can’t be held in reserve, and that essentially the sun delivers for free every day when it rises above the horizon. So that is an extraordinary boon to especially poor people around the world and an extraordinary threat to the fossil fuel industry, which is why you’re seeing the crazy pushback that marks the Trump administration. So with the Trump administration and this bill that they passed, The Big Beautiful Bill, that impacts tax credits for renewable projects like solar, how is that going to affect the solar power industry in the United States? It’s going to decimate it. There are already companies laying people off and going out of business because that tax credit was important and it’s, since we can’t do anything in Washington at the moment, why we need state and local governments to step up big to change the rules here and try to keep this momentum going in the States. The United States accounts for about 11% of emissions in the world. The other 89%, things are going much better than they are here, not just in China, but in all the places that China touches. In some ways, the most powerful story for me in the book was what happened in Pakistan last year. Now, Pakistan’s been hit harder by climate change than any country on earth. Its cities now routinely report temperatures of 125, 126 degrees. The two worst floods that really we’ve ever recorded on the planet happened in Pakistan over the last 15 years. Right now there’s big major, not quite as bad, but really serious flood across the Punjab. Pakistan also has an expensive and unreliable electric system. So about 18 months ago, people began importing in very large numbers, cheap Chinese solar panels from across their shared border. And within six months, eight months, Pakistanis, without government help, just basically using directions you can get on TikTok, had installed enough solar panels to equal half of the existing national electric grid in Pakistan. It’s the most amazing sort of citizen engineering project in history and of incredible value to people. Farmers in Pakistan, I don’t know if you’ve traveled in rural Asia, but the soundtrack of at part of the world is the hum of diesel pumps, often the cough of diesel generators because you need to bring up this irrigation water from quite a great depth to wells that came with the green revolution. Often for farmers, that diesel is the biggest single input cost that they have. So farmers were very early adopters here. Many of them lacked the money to build the steel supports that we’re used to seeing to hold your solar panels up. They just laid them on the ground and pointed them at the sun. Pakistanis last year used 35% less diesel than they did the year before. Now the same thing is happening in the last six months across large parts of Africa. Pretty much any place where there’s really deep established trade relations with China, and it’s not just solar panels. What the Chinese are also doing is building out the suite of appliances that make use of all that clean, cheap electricity. The most obvious example being electric vehicles and electric bikes. More than half the cars sold in China last month came with a plug dangling out the back, and now those are the top-selling cars in one developing nation after another around the world because they’re cheap and they’re good cars and because if you’re in Ethiopia or Djibouti or wherever you are, you have way more access to sunshine than you do to the incredibly long supply chain that you need to support a gasoline station. But my understanding, and my understanding is definitely dated, which is why I’m glad I’m talking to you, but for a very long time, my understanding of solar power was that it wasn’t that efficient, that you wouldn’t be able to get enough power to really do much of anything versus fossil fuels. Is it true that the Chinese have really invested in the technology and really pushed it forward? Yeah, I mean Chinese are now, you’ve heard of petro states, the Chinese are the first electro state in the world. This stuff works great and it works great here. I mean, I was telling you about what’s going on in California. In some ways, an even more remarkable story, given the politics, is that Texas is now installing clean energy faster than California because it’s the cheapest and it’s the fastest thing to put up. If you’re having to build data centers, and God knows, I’m not convinced we have to build as many data centers as we’re building, but if you do, the only thing that builds fast enough to get them up is solar or wind. You can put up a big solar farm in a matter of a few months as fast as you can build the dumb data center. Your question’s really important because for a very long time, all my life, we’ve called this stuff alternative energy, and it’s sort of been there on the fringe like maybe it’s not real big boy energy the way that oil and gas is. I think we’ve tended to think of it as the Whole Foods of energy. It’s like nice, but it’s pricey. It’s the Costco of energy now. It’s cheap, it’s available in bulk, it’s on the shelf ready to go. 95% of new electric generation around the world and around the country last year came from clean energy, and that’s precisely why the fossil fuel industry freaked out. You remember a year ago, Donald Trump told oil executives, “If you give me a billion dollars, you can have anything you want.” They gave him about half a billion between donations and advertising and lobbying. That was enough because he’s doing things even they couldn’t have imagined. I mean, he’s shut down two almost complete big wind farms off the Atlantic seaboard. I mean, it’s craziness. We’ve never really seen anything like it. Do you think we’ll be able to bounce back? As we’re watching all of these forward movements that have happened before Trump came back into office, it feels like he is burning it all down and not just burning it down, but salting the earth. Nothing’s going to grow there again. Yeah, I completely hear you. Yeah. This one possibility. Look, 10 years from now, if we stay on the course that Trump has us on, any tourist who can actually get a visa to come to America, it’ll be like a Colonial Williamsburg of internal combustion. People will come to gawk at how people used to live back in the olden days. I don’t think that that’s what’s going to happen. I think that at some point, reality is going to catch up with this, and everyone’s going to start figuring out we’re paying way more for energy than else in the world, and that means our economy is always on the back foot. That means that our consumers are always strapped. I mean, electricity prices are up 10% this year so far around this country because he keeps saying, “We’re not going to build the cheapest, fastest way to make more electricity.” I don’t see how that can last. But then I don’t see how any of this, none of it… I mean, I confess, I feel out of my depth now, the hatred of immigrants, the racial hatred, the insane economic policy around tariffs, none of it makes any real sense to me politically or morally. So I could be wrong, but I hope that America, which after all was where the solar cell was invented and where the first solar cell came out of Edison, New Jersey in 1954, the first commercial wind turbine in the world went up on a Vermont mountain about 30 miles south of where I’m talking from you speaking in the 1940s. That we’ve now gifted the future to China is just crazy no matter what your politics are. The idea that we are ceding ground to China is not just about solar energy, but in all sorts of ways. The move of the Trump administration to be sort of isolationists is actually hurting us way more than being open and growing and advancing. Yep, I couldn’t agree more. Look, I’ve been to China a bunch of times. I’m glad that I’m not a Chinese citizen because doing the work I do, I would’ve been in jail long ago, and I’m aware of that and understand the imperfections and deep flaws in that country. But I also understand that they have a deep connection to reason. They’ve elected engineers, or not elected, appointed engineers to run their country now for decades while we’ve been electing lawyers to run ours. And as a result, they’re not surprisingly better at building stuff. And so they have. And I think now, they’re using that to build a kind of moral legitimacy in the world. If the biggest problem the world faces turns out to be climate change, and I have no doubt that it is, then China’s going to be the global leader in this fight because we’ve just walked away from it. Yes. The question that comes to mind when you say that is, it’s clear to me that what some climate change skeptics and renewable energy skeptics have been able to do is to wrap things like solar power and wind energy into the culture war. So now that it’s a part of the culture war, people just stand against it because, well, they’re on the wrong team. Instead of looking at the economic reality that their bills could go down significantly if they dived in. It’s super true, but it’s also true that solar power is remarkably popular across partisan lines. The polling we have shows that yeah, the Republican voters are less enamored of it now because Trump’s been going so hard after it, but still like it by large margins and want more government support for it. I think the reason is that there are several ways to think about this. I’m concerned about climate change. I’m a progressive. I like the idea that we’re networking the groovy power of the sun to save our planet, but I’ve lived my whole life in rural America, much of it in red state, rural America. I have lots of neighbors who are very conservative. There’s lots of Trump flags on my road, and some of them fly in front of homes with solar panels on them because if you’re completely convinced that your home is your castle and that you’re going to defend with your AR-15, it’s a better castle if it has its own independent power supply up on the roof, and people have really figured that out. So this can cut both ways, and I hope that it will. That’s that story from Utah about the balcony solar. That’s the one place where people have said, “Well, there’s no reason not to do this. Let’s do it.” Yeah. So you’ve been doing this work for a really long time. I’m curious, when you started doing this work, could you have ever imagined the place that we are in right now as a country? No. Remember I was 27 when I wrote this first book, so my theory of change was people will read my book and then they will change. Turns out that that’s not exactly how it works. It took me a while to figure out. Really the story of my life is first 10 years after that, I just kept writing more books and giving talks and things because I thought being a journalist that we were having an argument and that if we won the argument, then our leaders would do the right thing because why wouldn’t they? Took me too long, at least a decade, to figure out that we had won the argument, but that we were losing the fight because the fight wasn’t about data and reason and evidence. The fight was about what fights are always about, money and power. And the fossil fuel industry had enough money and power to lose the argument, but keep their business model rolling merrily along. So that’s when I started just concluding that we needed to organize because if you don’t have billions of dollars, the only way to build power is to build movements. I started with seven college students, a thing called 350.org that became the first big global grassroots climate movement campaign. We’ve organized 20,000 demonstrations in every country on earth except North Korea. And in recent years, I’ve organized for old people like me, what we call Third Act, which now has about 100,000 Americans that work on climate and democracy and racial justice. And so this is a big sprawling fight, we don’t know how it’s going to come out. The reason I wrote this book, Here Comes the Sun, was just to give people a sense that all is not lost, that we do have some tools now that we can put to use. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

A new California law will effectively ban a deceptive policing tactic used for years against the families of people killed by police and popularized by the nation’s largest developer of law enforcement policy manuals.  The legislation, signed Monday by Gov. Gavin Newsom, will require investigators for police agencies and prosecutors’ offices to tell the families of people seriously injured or killed by police what has happened to their loved one before questioning them.  Investigators will also be barred from lying to families or pressuring them into consenting to interviews, and will be required to allow the families to bring a support person to interviews. All California police agencies and prosecutors will be required to incorporate the new restrictions into their department policies by January 2027.  The law will not require investigators to take the same steps in circumstances where the family member is under arrest or the delay could result in the destruction of evidence. State Assembly member Ash Kalra, who represents the city of San Jose, co-authored the new law and has been pushing for a version of the legislation for two years. He said he hoped the new law would signal the need for law enforcement officers to respect the families of people who have died during police encounters.  > “I want you sending a uniform[ed officer], detective—I don’t care—somebody out > there to their friends and family to find out what they’ve been up to.”  “I think it’s time for law enforcement to relearn their processes and create a new process that’s respectful of all life and allows them to build more trust with their community,” Kalra said. “ It’s really about giving justice to these families, but more immediately, giving them the truth.” Kalra added that he would continue to monitor the rollout of the law and would consider introducing new legislation if law enforcement agencies resisted its implementation.   The legislation comes in response to a 2023 investigation by Reveal and the Los Angeles Times, which found that investigators routinely withheld death notifications from families while they collected disparaging background information about people killed by officers. The reporting confirmed 20 instances of investigators across the state using the tactic in the immediate aftermath of police shootings and in-custody deaths in order to collect information about the deceased, such as their mental health history, drug use or family feuds. In some cases, law enforcement agencies then used the information to justify their officers’ actions or argue for lower settlements in lawsuits by portraying the deceased as mentally disturbed, a deadbeat parent or a liability to their family. “I’m proud of all the families, and even the assembly and senate and the governor, for having the courage to make this law,” said Jim Showman, who has been campaigning for the new law for two years. “It’s good to know that you can push things through and make change for the better.” In the moments after a San Jose police officer shot his 19-year-old daughter, Diana, officers rushed Showman to a police station, where detectives isolated him from his ex-wife and questioned him in an interrogation room for 27 minutes before revealing that Diana had died.  The department’s attorneys later used the information from the interview to push for a zero-dollar settlement in the case, he and his attorney, Jaime Leaños, said. The tactic was popularized in a 2019 webinar hosted by Lexipol, a company that develops policy manuals for thousands of law enforcement agencies across the country, including nearly all of California’s police departments.  In the webinar, Lexipol co-founder Bruce Praet encouraged police officers to rush to the families of people killed by officers and question them about the person’s mental health, drug use and family conflicts.  “The grapevine has gotten lightning fast,” Praet said in the webinar. “Before the dust settles, I want you sending a uniform[ed officer], detective—I don’t care—somebody out there to their friends and family to find out what they’ve been up to.”  Praet then pantomimed an interaction between an officer and a confused mother, who tells the officer about her son’s drug use and family problems before the officer reveals he is dead. Shocked, the mother reverses course, calling her son an “Eagle Scout” before Praet makes a gameshow buzzer sound. > Praet encouraged officers to describe people experiencing mental health crises > as being on drugs so that future jurors would be less likely to sympathize. “Sorry lady, you’re married to that evasive concept called the truth,” he said in the video. Lexipol removed the webinar from its website in 2022.  In an email, Praet declined to comment on the new law or his advice, saying he preferred to “ allow the legislators to comment on their legislation.” Silicon Valley DeBug, a San Jose advocacy group comprised of families who have lost loved ones to police violence, teamed up with Kalra in 2023 to author the first version of the bill, which failed to clear the state Senate last year.  The families didn’t give up. Their coalition grew to include dozens of people from across the state. Members campaigned for the bill at the Capitol and visited dozens of legislators to share their stories of being tricked or pressured into giving interviews to investigators after their loved ones were killed.  Kalra introduced an overhauled version of the bill this spring, which passed the senate in September. Among the families who advocated for the new law was DeAnna Sullivan, whose son, David, was fatally shot by Buena Park police officers in 2019 after the 19-year-old stole merchandise and a car from a gas station where he worked while in the midst of a mental health crisis.  After the shooting, Sullivan said Orange County DA investigators questioned her and her daughter about David’s mental health, his struggle to lose weight and his decision to join the military.   When she and her family sued the Buena Park Police Department for the wrongful death of her son, Praet, who defended the department in the lawsuit, used the information that she gave investigators to argue that the shooting was justified.  Praet paired the background information with the discovery of apparent suicide notes among David’s belongings after the shooting to argue that he had committed “suicide by cop,” which Sullivan denies.  Praet declined to comment on the case, but directed Mother Jones to court records detailing the apparent suicide notes. A former law enforcement officer and long-time defense attorney known for defending police agencies in civil lawsuits, Praet has also spent years training officers across California. His advice has long centered on helping departments avoid or beat civil rights lawsuits.  Since Praet co-founded it in 2003, Lexipol has grown into the nation’s largest private developer of policies for police agencies.  The company has fallen under scrutiny in the past for writing what some critics allege are vaguely-written, cookie-cutter policies that make it difficult to hold officers accountable. In a series of webinars that were on the company’s website until early 2022, he encouraged officers to describe people experiencing mental health crises as being on drugs in their police reports so that if they sued, Praet said, future jurors would be less likely to sympathize with “druggies.” He also told police to encourage wounded suspects to pose and smile in evidence photos as a method for preemptively undermining the suspect’s potential future lawsuits.  After reporting by Reveal and the Los Angeles Times exposed that advice, Lexipol distanced itself from its co-founder and apologized for Praet’s comments.  Lexipol representatives did not respond to requests for comment for this story.  Because Lexipol writes the policy manuals for the vast majority of California law enforcement agencies and updates many of those policies when relevant new laws are passed, the company will likely be responsible for updating those policies and effectively banning the tactic its co-founder helped popularize.  “That is irony, isn’t it?” Jim Showman said. Showman added that it also meant the families would need to remain vigilant as Lexipol began updating police policies to reflect the new law.  “I guess the fight’s not over,” he said. “We’ve gotta hold their feet to the fire to make sure they make policy with the spirit of the law.”

Even attending university in the 1960s was a revolutionary and complicated process for Ed Roberts, who was paralyzed by polio in his early teens. Now known as the father of the independent living movement, Roberts—faced with many structural hurdles to moving through society—began pushing as a young man to win disabled people the resources to live in their communities, rather than in restrictive and often brutal institutions. His activism led to the development of independent living centers, which assist with everything from helping people find personal aides to helping to sign them up for affordable, accessible housing in to guarantee as much personal freedom and agency as possible to people who would once have been forced into dehumanizing circumstances.  As a disabled person who went to graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, also Roberts’ undergraduate and graduate school, I knew of Roberts’ accomplishments—but not so much the details of his struggles, both around adjusting to becoming disabled and in the fight to launch his centers across California and eventually the country. > “It’s a beautiful American story, and what I mean by American is the story…is > about the marginalized coming together.” Chapman University disability scholar Scot Danforth’s new book, An Independent Man: Ed Roberts and the Fight for Disability Rights, covers just that. Danforth delves into other shortcomings, like limitations in the diversity of the independent living movement along race and gender lines. With mostly white figures leading the independent movement, he writes, “it was undeniable that disability rights was a predominantly white project,” notwithstanding the contributions of others like Black disability activist Brad Lomax.  I spoke to Danforth about Roberts’ life, the importance of his work, the origins of his activism, and the expansion of the independent living movement.  With disability rights under attack, why is it crucial to study Roberts’ life?  I think it’s important for people to not only understand what the disability rights movement achieved: the average everyday folks out in public, they see curb cuts, they see accessibility, they see parking spots. They’re aware of a certain amount of accessibility in society and most of that relies on a series of laws, Section 504, ADA and other laws. But what people tend not to know is the stories of how all of that was achieved, and the laws themselves, frankly, unless you’re a lawyer, are probably pretty boring. The stories are fascinating. The people and, you know, for me to get to write about Ed Roberts, Judy Heumann, Justin Dart, and on and on and on. It’s a beautiful American story, and what I mean by American is the story—which we’ve seen over and over in different kinds of civil rights movements—is about the marginalized coming together and unifying and saying, “We’re going to fight back, and we’re going to fight to be valued. We’re going to fight to have our place.” Catherine Dugan, left, holds notes while Ed Roberts testifies in 1977 at a congressional hearing in San Francisco on increased access and rights for disabled people.Clem Albers/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty People say, “Oh, I know we have a Martin Luther King [Jr.] Day.” They probably don’t know much more that, but almost no one knows stories of the disability rights movement, and people like Ed Roberts doing incredible things to build the very things that are being attacked right now. > “We’re up against people who think people with disabilities don’t belong in > society at all. It’s a complete regression to early eugenics.” The obstacles that stood in Ed Roberts’ way were mostly ignorance and incompetence. People didn’t wake up in the morning and say, “I’m out to fight those disabled people because they’re bad guys.” That wasn’t what they’re up against. They’re up against people getting disability wrong, thinking that it meant sickness and weakness, thinking people couldn’t live full lives. But now, we’re up against people who think people with disabilities don’t belong in society at all. It’s a complete regression to early eugenics, from the early 1900s. What role did Roberts’ mother, Zona, play in helping Ed Roberts get on the path to cause change?  Zona taught Ed how to fight. She was not comfortable with fighting and was not comfortable with conflict and anger. When I interviewed her, she told me that she was not comfortable being angry. But there was that first time Ed was about to graduate from high school, and the school officials told him and told Zona that Ed could not graduate because he still needed to meet requirements for physical education and driver’s education. And at first, Zona thought they were joking—but then she realized they really meant it. She took it to a number of different administrators in the district, and at one point, the district sent the assistant superintendent to her house—and she thought this was ideal, because Ed’s iron lung, big, massive steel lung that did the breathing for him sat right in the middle of of the living room. Although he typically wouldn’t be there in the afternoon, they put him there in the afternoons for this visit, because she wanted to make it obvious that this was ridiculous, and the man didn’t pick up on the cues at all. He looked down in Ed’s eyes, and he said, “You wouldn’t want a cheap diploma, would you?” And Zona, a small woman, she just leaned against that guy and bum-rushed him out the front door. And that was just the start. Later on, when they got to Berkeley, there were lots of meetings because the Department of Rehabilitation said that Ed was “infeasible,” meaning that he wasn’t worth their money. And so, although he was admitted, there was no way he was going to go. They had to appeal that decision through multiple levels of bureaucracy to get support from the California Department of Rehabilitation—ironically, the organization that Ed later was the leader of—but at every step, she was fighting for him, and he was learning from her how to fight. So really, throughout his entire life, she, more than anyone, was his mentor and supporter. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the founding of the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley. What made the CIL a radical idea?  > “[Roberts] really became the troubadour who ran out and told everyone, ‘Look > what we can do for ourselves.’” This was the early 1970s; there already was a concept called independent living that was circulating through the vocational rehabilitation field, but what they meant was intensive skill training to try to teach people with various kinds of disabilities how to do more for themselves without assistance. Essentially raising their skill level so they could, you know, take care of making their own food, bathing and dressing and everyday tasks. That was not really a useful idea to many of the early disability rights leaders in Berkeley, because they had different levels of paralysis, and succeeded because they had a personal assistant. This idea of independent living is about getting the right kinds of assistance under the direction of the disabled person: put that person in charge.  The center was radical, because it was completely self-help. The idea was disabled people helping disabled people. And that was crazy to the medical people and the [Department of Rehabilitation] folks. That was like saying the patients are going to cure themselves. [But] they weren’t curing themselves. They knew how to help one another. They understood and not only knew how to help one another, but they they found tremendous social support in that place and in that group. So it became a source of pride, something they owned. Ed, of course, saw it and was aware of this, and he thought there should be one of these on every corner. This should be across America—which is what we have now. There are about 400 across the US, and he spread the idea all over the world: Europe, Australia, Canada, [and] Japan. He really became the troubadour who ran out and told everyone, “Look what we can do for ourselves.”  How did Roberts work from within the California government to push for the expansion of independent living centers and disability rights in general? Expanding the CILs [Centers for Independent Living] was his really his highest priority. He did a lot of work on a whole long list of laws that had the support of Jerry Brown, who was governor. They passed many access laws, everything from access to parks, government buildings, polling places, on and on and on. But the CIL funding, he knew, was the real key to spreading independent living and independent living centers around the country, and getting government money behind it. It wasn’t going to make it purely on donations and grants and the kinds of things that had funded the Berkeley operation. > “The cultural response to disability in the ’70s was to tell young people, > ‘You’re sick, you’re frail, stay at home, don’t do very much, don’t get out > and have a life.’ And Ed was pushing people to do the opposite.” Ed worked on a bill with [future Berkeley mayor] Tom Bates, who was an assemblyman that Ed already knew well and [who] loved to work with the disability community. He worked closely with the CIL and Judy Heumann, and they put together a bill to fund 10 independent living centers in the budget every year. They got that passed.  In 1978, the federal government also took this up as part of revising the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, and so they were considering independent living as part of that at the federal level. Ed fought for that and really made an extreme effort to arrange for there to be congressional hearings. But despite his efforts, they only appropriated a small amount of funds initially. Over the years, they kept at it, and those funds increased later, and now we have over 400 around the country. What lessons do you think young disabled people can learn from Roberts’ work? I’m trying to think of what Ed would want to teach. In the ’70s, he went around and made quite a few speeches encouraging people with disabilities to take more risks. A strong part of the cultural response to disability in the ’70s was to tell young people, “You’re sick, you’re frail, stay at home, don’t do very much, don’t get out and have a life.” And Ed was pushing people to do the opposite. You need to take risks. Ed’s risks were a little extreme. He went whitewater rafting down the Stanislaus River. He was like, “You’ve gotta get out and show people that we are alive and we’re here and we’re living fully. We’re not just patients.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In 2018, Monica Ruiz and her neighbors found letters from their landlord taped to their doors. They were notifications of rent hikes—in some cases, increases of over 200 percent. Ruiz had lived at Hillside Villa, a large apartment complex overlooking Los Angeles’ gentrifying Chinatown, for more than 20 years. She had raised five children there. Her youngest daughter attended the nearby elementary school, where she had taken Mandarin classes since kindergarten. She didn’t want to give them up or leave her friends. “I didn’t know how to explain it to her. I just said, ‘No, we aren’t going to move,’” Ruiz recalled. Ruiz didn’t know if she could find another affordable home anywhere in Los Angeles. And she didn’t want to. She had long tended a community garden in the courtyard of Hillside Villa’s two L-shaped buildings that had become a gathering space for barbecues and quinceañeras, right next to the thriving papaya plants she had nurtured. > “I didn’t know how to explain it to her. I just said, ‘No, we aren’t going to > move.'” The complex had started as a triumph of Reaganomics. President Ronald Reagan demonized public housing as a budgetary blight. Through a series of reforms, his administration instead floated tax credits to incentivize private developers to build low-income housing where rents would be capped, typically for three decades or more. The policy essentially created a network of affordable housing with an expiration date, one that would kick the low-­income housing can down the road to a future generation of politicians. Lawrence Chan, the son of a billionaire Hong Kong developer, began construction on Hillside Villa in 1986 using a combination of those federal tax credits and municipal loans to fund the project. In exchange for the support, when the apartment complex opened in 1989, he agreed to a 30-year covenant with the city of Los Angeles committing to keep rents low. Chan sold Hillside Villa in 2000. When the covenant expired in 2018, the new landlord, Tom Botz, was left with no obligation to provide affordable housing. That’s when Ruiz found the letter on her door. Americans of most income levels and in almost every community are all too familiar with the housing crisis, pushed on by a lack of inventory and rising rents and mortgage costs. But the crisis is particularly acute among low-­income people, who face a shortage of around 7.1 million affordable units, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. The tenants of Hillside Villa had been part of a sprawling network of over 2.6 million units whose rents are kept affordable by the federal low-income housing tax credit program, according to the National Housing Preservation Database. Over the next decade, 800,000-plus homes are slated to lose the rental restrictions set in place during Reagan’s pivot away from government-run housing. The women of the Hillside Villa Tenants Association before the start of a community meeting.Zaydee Sanchez/Mother Jones Hillside Villa’s residents had been drawn by its low rents and quiet neighborhood. They were immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, and Vietnam who worked as street vendors, cleaners, and construction workers. Ruiz originally wound up in the complex after being forced out of her home downtown, which was razed to make way for a convention center expansion. Adela Cortez and Rosario Hernandez had similar stories of being displaced by development. They, along with Ruiz and several other Latina women, would prove their mettle as mainstays of the tenant organizers. > “I feel completely overwhelmed by the scale of housing insecurity that we’re > facing in Los Angeles.” The residents pushed the city and their landlord to enact a 10-year covenant extension that could keep more than 100 low-income tenants housed. One morning, they even showed up outside Botz’s home in Malibu, urging him to sign. But Botz, who declined interview requests, refused, underlining a fundamental problem: When private landlords are called upon to deliver affordable housing, affordability can live and die by a landlord’s whim. Feeling they had no other options, the tenants staged a rent strike. They called Spanish-language television stations. They held sit-ins outside local officials’ offices. They knocked on neighbors’ doors and met regularly with the LA Tenants Union and the Chinatown Community for Equitable Development. With their back rent accumulating, the tenants pushed an unconventional solution: The city could loan itself money to buy Hillside Villa, force a sale through eminent domain, and then transfer ownership to a land trust or nonprofit that would run the complex, keep rents low, and pay the city back. Monica Ruiz and her youngest daughter, Jamie Ruiz, embrace. Zaydee Sanchez Eminent domain—the power of government to seize and redevelop property—has a bad rap, particularly in Los Angeles, where it’s been used to build freeways and stadiums and destroy working-class communities. But, the tenants reasoned, because it is a power the government can exercise in almost any situation, it could be used to save Hillside Villa from Botz and his rent increases. The city’s Housing Department began looking into the proposal and told the city council that eminent domain would be too costly. It instead recommended a deal: The city would give Botz almost $15 million to extend the terms of the covenant for 10 more years. The tenants would pay the five years of back rent they owed, plus up to 3 percent interest, or face eviction. After the tenants said they couldn’t afford to do so, Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, Hillside Villa’s local representative, negotiated a six-month repayment grace period and pledged to help fundraise to fill any gap, committing $250,000 from her council office. But the tenants denounced the deal as a giveaway, leaving the standoff in place. Nithya Raman, an LA councilmember who heads its Housing and Homelessness Committee, acknowledges the extension plan is more kicking the can. “I feel completely overwhelmed by the scale of housing insecurity that we’re facing in Los Angeles,” said Raman, who was elected in 2020 after campaigning on tenant rights and the housing crisis. The deal “is only a 10-year extension,” she explains, “leaving them potentially in this exact same situation a decade later.” Preserving existing affordable housing is just one part of the solution, according to Shane Phillips, a housing expert at UCLA’s Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. “It’s certainly a big problem that a lot of covenants are expiring,” he said. “It is a much bigger problem because our city, this region, has not built nearly enough housing over the past 30 or so years—relative to job growth, relative to demand, relative to just people being born.” Last year, California’s powerful landlord lobby spent over $150 million to shut down a state proposition that would have expanded local governments’ ability to enact rent control. While LA was exploring expanding investments into housing via an existing voter-approved mansion tax last year, Mayor Karen Bass’ latest proposed budget will cut affordable housing funds to help close a $1 billion deficit. > “Our city, this region, has not built nearly enough housing over the past 30 > or so years—relative to job growth, relative to demand, relative to just > people being born.” The National Low Income Housing Coalition notes that the shortage cannot be filled by states alone and that “Congress must significantly increase federal investments in programs that both preserve and expand the supply of deeply affordable units and bridge the gaps between incomes and rent.” While Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) introduced a bill in 2024 with Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) that would have created a federal agency to acquire and maintain apartment buildings for low-income Americans, since then, at least a billion dollars in federal funding for affordable housing has been axed by the Trump administration. Los Angeles’ Chinatown still provides affordable housing options, making it a critical area for low-income residents.Zaydee Sanchez Ruiz, who does not drive, is determined to remain in the home where she raised four children in part because of its access to public transportation.Zaydee Sanchez Last September, a Hillside Villa tenant prevailed in court against Botz, who was trying to evict him and other tenants for their ongoing rent strike; Botz dropped his related eviction cases. None of what the Hillside Villa tenants have accomplished—through the city council or in court—would’ve been possible if they hadn’t organized collectively. Now in the seventh year of their fight, they’re part of a nationally resurgent tenant movement. Last year, New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom went to Kentucky to profile the Louisville Tenants Union, which is organizing to protect tenants in a historically segregated city where politicians and developers have targeted historically Black neighborhoods for redevelopment and gentrification. This past spring, a group of Bronx tenants successfully fought their landlord over uninhabitable conditions, prompting New York City to strip his ownership of the building—a first in seven years. Tenants unions have even started to band together. Louisville’s helped launch the Tenant Union Federation, a coalition working to win national protections. Another founder of the federation, KC Tenants of Kansas City, Missouri, began a rent strike in October. When participating members got attention on X for burning late fee notices, the Hillside Villa tenants’ account replied with a similar photo, taken in their leafy courtyard. It showed their own action, with residents wearing their signature red shirts and cheering as an eviction notice was engulfed in flame. “WE LOVE TO SEE IT,” they wrote. This story was produced in partnership with Los Angeles Public Press. Translation and additional reporting by Martín Macías Jr.

Retired Brigadier General Greg Smith spent 35 years in the Army National Guard. He’s seen riots. He’s protected political conventions. He led the military’s joint task force in response to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. But he’s never witnessed the US armed forces being used the way they’ve been deployed recently in Los Angeles. “This is madness,” he says of President Donald Trump’s call-up of both the National Guard and the Marines in response to protests over the administration’s immigration raids. Normally, federal troops are deployed at the request of a governor, often when a state’s resources are overwhelmed with something like mass protests or a natural disaster. But earlier this month, Trump unilaterally federalized 4,000 soldiers from the California National Guard and called in 700 Marines in response to protests opposing raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement—all without the consent of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Smith says it appears there’s little to no communication between local police and those military groups, which could lead to potential conflicts on the ground. But he also sees a larger issue playing out: the president wielding the armed forces for purely political purposes. “I’m watching the military becoming co-opted by politicians, and where that leads is some really troubling places,” Smith says. “If that happens, the roots of our democracy are in extreme danger.” On this week’s More To The Story, Smith talks with host Al Letson about the “madness” of federal troops entering LA in response to recent protests, why the Insurrection Act needs reformed, and what he sees as the military being increasingly tasked with enforcing a political agenda rather than defending the Constitution. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This interview was edited for length and clarity.