The same systemic forces that steal Black communities’ cultural harvest are being met with an unbreakable resilience, as neighbors build solidarity networks, reclaim land, and seed a future where their culture can thrive.
At the start of this year we watched fires rage across California.
Among the many lives and communities impacted are Monique Williams and her daughter, Bianca Williams-Alonzo, who lost their Altadena family home in the Eaton Fire. For Ms. Monique, “Beautiful Altadena,” as she so lovingly called it, wasn’t just a town; it was a diverse community where people took care of each other. Their house had been in the family for over 50 years but in one day their sanctuary was reduced to ash. This loss was a political, cultural, social, and spiritual –– a wound that revealed how climate disaster, housing insecurity, and systemic inequities converge to strip Black people, in particular, from the communities we’ve cultivated and harvested.
Housing injustice, climate disasters, and systemic environmental racism intersect to disproportionately harm Black families. At the heart of these inequities are overlapping crises: adaptation apartheid, the systemic practice where Black and historically dispossessed are excluded from the resources, support, and infrastructure needed to adapt to climate change; climate gentrification, the climate-driven displacement of vulnerable communities; and extractive, polluting economies that target Black communities as sacrifice zones.
These overlapping crises are compounded by policy failures that ensure recovery is too often unequal and exclusionary. In Altadena, historic redlining practices resulted in the concentration of Black families into the parts of the city most affected by the fire. While more than 2,800 Black households were forced to evacuate, only one L.A. County firetruck was on the scene in the predominantly Black neighborhood of West Altadena during critical moments in the Eaton fires. Extreme weather events that used to occur once in a lifetime are now happening annually and with an increasingly extreme and deadly intensity. Every response before, during, and after these events consistently reveals and exacerbates how generations of structural discrimination have placed Black communities at the greatest risk. Nonetheless, Black communities have not and will never back down from cultivating resilience, grounded in culture, power, and care. As a network of Black organizers, scientists, advocates, and experts, the Black Hive collectively understands that in this moment we need to be strategizing, planning for, and building what we need and desire the world to look like in 7 generations and beyond. The co-creation of a future where Black communities have everything they need to thrive is our harvest, our business, and our magnitude and bond.
Harvest
Monique Williams recalls the beauty of her childhood home: looking up at the mountains, sitting beneath the deodar trees, picking lemons and grapefruits from their backyard. Her daughter, Bianca, who spent her early childhood in the three-bedroom house, later returned as a young adult. She lovingly remembers the third bedroom not just as a space for living but as a space of care, for gathering, a political home, and a refuge always open to someone in need. The loss of her home, she says, is not just about objects, but about the loss of cherished memories: photo albums, childhood keepsakes, a flute Monique’s mother worked several shifts to buy for her in the sixth grade. Her community was an embodiment of Black homes and neighborhoods being more than just physical spaces but also sacred sites carrying culture, dreams, resistance, and collective care through generations.
These communities have been cultivated under centuries of systemic racism and assault, providing not just shelter but safety, memory, and political refuge. In New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina, Black neighborhoods like the Lower 9th Ward represented deep-rooted communal life. In the San Francisco Bayview/Hunter’s Point neighborhood, Black people forged a community in the shadows of naval shipyards, corporate pollution, and toxic exposure, only to face redevelopment schemes that pushed out generations of Black families who once built sanctuary there. Black communities in Detroit transformed restrictive, segregated neighborhoods into vibrant cultural centers, with homeownership enclaves and artistry, all while carving out cooperatives that sustained families for generations, until discriminatory lending and the mass foreclosure of the 2008 housing crisis. Now, climate-driven extreme flooding is stripping Black homeowners of security and cultural memory. In Miami’s Liberty City, Black families built community and resilience on higher ground, only to face climate gentrification as developers seized upon the neighborhood’s elevation and displaced longtime residents. On Sapelo Island, descendants of the Gullah Geechee have preserved land and culture for over two centuries, only to face a new wave of zoning laws, voter suppression, and developer pressure threatening to displace one of the last intact Geechee communities.
These homes and neighborhoods were not accidents of geography. They were deliberate spaces of survival, cultivated through Black solidarity and creativity. Black communities define the harvest of struggle: communities built against the odds of redlining, racist zoning laws, and predatory lending and development, and now the intersectional impacts of the climate crisis and environmental justice
Today, it is very clear that not only are geographies under threat, but also centuries of Black cultural harvest.
Whether through wildfires, hurricanes, toxic neglect, or speculative development, our harvest –– our homes, our land, our culture –– is being stolen. The climate crisis magnifies the urgency of defending what Black communities have hard earned, even as state abandonment and predatory practices deepen our wonders.
Business
Black communities have always known survival to be collective. But today disaster itself has become a business, where corporations and profiteers extract wealth from our pain. During the California fires, over 1,100 incarcerated fire-fighters –– mostly Black men and women(?) –– worked 24-hour shifts for as little as 26 cents a day. Insurance companies deny payouts and abandon Black communities altogether, while developers swoop in with pennies-on-the-dollar offers to families desperate after loss. In Altadena, grieving families, like the Williams, are being approached by speculators hoping to flip charred land into luxury real estate. In this treacherous economy, recovery is commodified and survival is for sale. More than half of the post-fire land sales are by developers in contrast to only about 15% of developer buyers at the start of 2024.
As climate disasters increase in frequency and intensity, the Williams family’s story reflects a larger lesson: our collective liberation isn’t found in isolation; it’s deepening our connections, organizing collectively , and remaining connected in times of crisis. The L.A. fires burnt against the backdrop of an economy that treats basic needs like safety, shelter, and sustenance as commodities rather than rights, forcing the most vulnerable to shoulder the costs of disasters they did not create. From Louisiana’s Cancer Alley to Pennsylvania’s steel towns, Black neighborhoods are treated as sacrifice zones. Residents live and die next to polluting industries that enrich corporations while shortening Black lives.
But we reject this logic. Housing justice is climate justice.
We cannot leave survival, resiliency, and community care to profiteers. We must reclaim systems of recovery through community land trusts, cooperative housing, and grassroots disaster relief. These are not charity projects but necessary alternatives to the predatory systems poisoning Black communities across the United States. What is possible when Black communities seize control of systems to build resilience and community care models that allow our communities to co-create a future where black people exist and thrive? This is what we are (doing) in the Black Hive. It is not enough to simply respond to the assaults and disasters that are occurring to Black communities on the frontline of environmental injustice. We must now build resiliency that strengthens our capacity to prepare for, respond to, and reduce the impact of extreme weather events.
Magnitude and bond
While the climate crisis is indifferent to borders, race, or class, systems are not. For the Williams family and many Black communities, the L.A. fires are not an isolated tragedy. They are emblematic of a broader reality: Black communities across the United States are on the frontlines of climate destruction, displacement, and neglect.
In the Black Hive, our work is rooted in knowledge, science, advocacy, and action at the intersection of environmental justice, climate resilience, and systemic equity. The Black Climate Mandate is our north star that we use to guide our collective as we co-create a transformative vision for the future and our resiliency strategy is a love letter to communities most impacted by the climate crisis and a legacy for generations yet to be born. This strategy is grounded in four ways: resilience, response, repair, and restoration. Response works across timelines, providing rapid support within the first 24 hours of an event to reduce harm and deliver critical resources. Repair builds power and accountability, ensuring that government agencies and disaster networks are held responsible, while also addressing the mental, physical, cultural harm and loss suffered by Black communities. Restoration can extend over the long term, creating access to clean air, water, and land; rebuilding homes, preserving culture, and fostering healing through storytelling and building alternatives. To achieve this, we are moving a multi-year strategy to develop resiliency hubs across the country that are rooted in Black culture, power, and care. These Hubs move together as a solidarity network that shares strategies, resources, tools, and skills in times of climate crisis and extreme weather events. Regionally located and locally rooted by Black-led organizations, these hubs are designed to respond to the immediate and long-term needs of navigating the climate crisis.
Between extreme weather events, floods, global forest fires, and, indeed, the inheritance of ancestors who survived enslavement, displacement, and systemic, state-sanctioned violence, the presence and solidarity of Black communities opening homes to each other after climate disaster, and the vision for a liberated future is the glue of our collective magnitude.
The climate crisis is a call to action. We are being confronted with the deliberate neglect embedded in our infrastructure and the systemic failures of governments to protect our communities most impacted in this new climate reality. Unless we take drastic measures, these kinds of events will continue to devastate our communities, which are already under siege.
Conclusion
The solutions we seek are not new. They are grounded in community, Ancestral knowledge, traditional ecological wisdom, and the leadership of Black communities and Black-led climate organizations. The climate crisis is vast, but so is our power when we act in solidarity.
As the Black Hive’s Climate Mandate reminds us: health is a human right, water is life, land is nourishment, healing for Black communities and no human is replaceable. It lays out a vision for resilience hubs, community-driven adaptation and care, and climate justice grounded in Black liberation. To move beyond adaptation apartheid we must prioritize fairness and justice in disaster relief, repair, and restoration. We must reject adaptation apartheid and adopt clear standards of fairness and justice to make sure disaster relief, repair, restoration and access to emergency funding prioritizes Black communities. We must ensure Black communities receive funding, disaster loans, and grants they have long been denied, while establishing legal protections for climate migrants, equitable relocation efforts, and land justice fair access to, ownership of, and control over land as land grabbing and climate gentrification takes hold. Black homes, communities, and businesses must no longer be denied loans and grants from agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which have historically overlooked their needs. In addition, legal pathways and protections for climate migration must be established, ensuring displaced individuals have the access to resources to rebuild their lives. This includes equitable funding for relocation efforts and initiatives to transform impacted communities into inclusive, resilient, healthy and sustainable societies.
Across the nation, we are organizing communities who are already building this future:
- Resilience hubs that serve safety centers during climate disasters
- Mutual aid networks that distribute supplies after hurricanes
- Cooperative farms and gardens reclaiming land for community
- Resistance against housing displacement through collective land stewardship
The Black Hives’ call for Climate and Environmental Justice demands more than just a new global governmental response that protects and serves the people. It requires a response that returns power into the people’s hands, rather than serving up our lives to the biggest profiteers and polluters.
