“The day the Exxon Valdez oil spill happened was the day the water died, yet it was also the day that something inside of me was ignited,” says Dune. “I realized that this is not how it ends; this is how it began for me, for us. We had to dig down deep inside our beliefs and our dreams to face our fears, to find the courage and strength to step up and be louder than everything else – yet remain a voice of reason – while we take on the powers that be, [who] got us into this mess in the first place.”

“If this happened in the wealthy part of town, it would’ve changed in 1985 instead of now.”

While state health officials note that their health-assessment analyses can’t determine what caused cancers in West Eugene, residents like Arberry-Baribeault believe there’s a connection between the dogs, kids and adults who have gotten sick and the toxic chemicals surrounding them.

Flanary, 36, has about 2.5 million subscribers across TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter, where his pointed satire of medicine’s many absurdities has ballooned into a cast of characters and a cottage industry. Flanary’s escalating popularity is all the more notable because his jokes, delivered in short skits, plumb the inane depths of American health care. The specificity is by design, Flanary said, giving his peers something to relate to and a growing audience of outsiders something to laugh at.

For more than two decades, Earthjustice has litigated and advocated for the federal government to remove the dams, which were built primarily to aid water transport. Today there are better alternatives and the cost the dams impose on salmon and Native communities is unsupportable. Their work is one part of a broader effort to restore the lower Snake River, healthy salmon, and orcas and achieve a measure of justice for Northwest tribes.

At the Anderson Tribute Center, members of Post 22 gathered with the community to note discriminatory actions against Japanese American World War II veterans decades ago, apologizing for those actions and honoring the descendants of those discriminated against.

“In general, in the psychedelic world, I see a lack of awareness of the fact we’re still here and practicing our traditions,” said Keith Williams, advisory board member and director of research and social innovation at First Nations Technical Institute, an Indigenous-run higher education institution based on Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, Ontario. “These plant medicines are very much Indigenous medicines.”

“We are working to create a new society based on human rights, indivisible, and interrelated.”

As Indigenous communities and smallholder farmers in Africa, and Kenya specifically, absorb the costs of the climate crisis, they work to resist, reform, and build alternatives to the nuanced crises which threaten their autonomy, food sovereignty, health and ecosystems.

With a vacuum of federal leadership on climate change, California Governor Jerry Brown convened a first-of-its-kind Global Climate Action Summit in September to forge “deeper worldwide commitments” among global leaders. But the exclusive gathering failed to include those most impacted by the crisis, instead inviting some of the institutions most responsible for it.