People walk through MLK Park near Santa Fe and Nystrom Village neighborhoods in Richmond, California, March 23, 2021. Photos by Sarahbeth Maney for OneZero.

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Black in the Time of Climate Change

Coal Is In Decline, But Its Effects Still Ravage Black and Latinx Communities

Across the U.S., people of color point to a root cause: environmental racism

Drew Costley
Published in
11 min readApr 5, 2021

Wind blows oily black dust onto cars, windowsills, and lawns as a 100-car train loaded with coal rolls past Parchester Village, a historically Black neighborhood in Richmond, California. This happens a couple of times a week. The train’s cargo, mined from the mountains of Utah by the coal giant Wolverine Fuels, will join the towering piles of coal at the Levin-Richmond Terminal, a privately owned coal shipping port seven miles away. The terminal is responsible for a quarter of the coal the United States ships from the West Coast to Asia.

The coal dust gets so thick that some say you can write your name in it. This has long been a fact of life for the residents of Parchester Village and of Santa Fe and Nystrom Village, two nearby communities of color.

“You’ve got that little black residue that people are breathing in,” says Dale Weatherspoon, pastor at Easter Hill United Methodist Church, which is near the terminal. Richmond has the highest number of emergency department visits for asthma-related symptoms in its county, Contra Costa.

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Future Human
Future Human

Published in Future Human

Future Human was science publication from Medium about the survival of our species. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Drew Costley
Drew Costley

Written by Drew Costley

Drew Costley is a Staff Writer at FutureHuman covering the environment, health, science and tech. Previously @ SFGate, East Bay Express, USA Today, etc.

Responses (8)

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Any chance you will pen an article about how mining of coal affected generations of poor whites? Oh yeah…that does not fit your “narrative.”

2

I went to elementary school about a quarter mile from an active coal mine in the 1960s. You'd get a black ring on your collar. A lot of the kids in the school had fathers that worked in the mine, and the others worked in steel mills where they used…

communities

We as a country require more energy than you could possibly produce with current clean energy. So shutting down coal also would make it very expensive for this low income neighborhoods to afford to heat there homes — there are new advancements in…