Fire Drill

Project Description

I have participated in and photographed many climate protests. Across the world, such actions have successfully utilized and diffused claims gaining the attention of policymakers to take action for an ecologically sustainable future. I was originally interested in the events in California through informants, not to mention the spectacle of Jane Fonda’s “Fire Drill Fridays” and Green New Deal agendas. As I built connections over several months of work prior to the pandemic, I gained insight into the motivations and circumstances of the lives of people living in the midst of industrial pollution, oil refineries, and environmental racism.

This work also sparked reflection. Commenting on past incarnations of Green New Deals, political scientist Timothy Luke has remarked that there has been a deep disconnect between the “romance” of the New Deal and FDR’s Keynesianism and its actuality. Luke warns that “taking the New Deal as a policy black box without weighing its contents…is an easy rhetorical turn that its present-day proponents would simply have us paint all over with ‘green’ initiatives” (15).

It largely remains to be seen what Joe Biden, anointed as the 21st century FDR, will do. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others seem to recognize that progressive policy agendas need to actually make a difference for communities of color, and remedy long standing problems of the decaying industrial core of America and environmental injustices.

Project Outcomes

• Featured in The Society Pages