Beneath the Blazing Sun, Black Phoenix Sows Community
July 02, 2025 at 12:58AMAdam Mahoney is one of America’s most humane climate journalists. His stories respect the systematic and overlapping challenges of life in the Anthropocene but always engage them from the ground up, centering the lives and labor of people made uniquely, terribly vulnerable by global warming. For his latest, Mahoney visits Phoenix, Arizona, “one of the first Western havens for Black Americans,” and details the ways in which the city’s development encouraged social isolation and detachment from the land—dynamics made perilous by extreme heat. “This place isn’t created with us in mind,” Dionne Washington, a third-generation Black farmer, tells him. Mahoney’s focus on people, on the histories that place them, makes Washington’s comment a devastating one. But Washington wields that same focus to find seedlings of solution, growing right where he is.
Now, every morning, Hawkins stoops in her backyard, hands deep in the soil her grandfather once turned. Her vision for the future is both radical and restorative. Where her grandfather’s grapevines and orange trees once flourished, tomatoes, wheat and beans now thrive, tended by Hawkins and her 4-year-old son Zayne, who delights in stuffing his mouth with strawberries and elderberries until his face is stained magenta.
Her afternoons are spent in community with other locals under the shade of the fruit trees, chatting about the books she’s reading while Zayne eagerly digs his feet into the soil and plays hide-and-seek in the bushes. Hawkins yearns to heal generational disconnection and ensure that Black children like Zayne grow up knowing how to cherish, tend and reclaim the Earth. “I want him to grow up knowing that we have a right to this land.” It’s this vision that keeps her in Phoenix.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/01/black-phoenix-climate-change-heat/
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