The Deluge, page 16
“Please.”
You hustle to the passenger side and, climbing in, you can feel the heater on full blast, pouring forth wonderful hot air. In the cocoon of the car, you rub your hands furiously, rip your boots off, and try to massage warmth back into your toes.
“Sorry,” you say. “My feet stink, but I think I’m close to frostbite.”
“This is unbelievable,” she says, watching you. “It’s all the way from Canada to Mississippi. It was on the news.”
“Why’re you sitting out here?” you ask. And now that you’re finally looking at her, you realize you know her. The black girl from the other day. “I seen you here before,” you add.
“Just need the cash.”
“I mean, it’s closed. Why don’t you leave?”
She looked out the window. “Can’t go back to where I’m living. Got problems there. Was trying to get me money for a hotel room.”
“I’m trying to get some booze. Or Oxy. You don’t got any of either, do you?”
She looks uncertain of both you and herself. You’re glad you didn’t tiptoe around the issue. You want it so bad, and you can just feel it humming in the veins of the universe that she’s got some. You just know it.
“Not Oxy,” she says, and a bag crinkles as she pulls it from her jacket. “This.”
You stare longingly at the powder secured in the corner of the baggie with a rubber band.
“You got stuff to shoot it with?”
She nods.
“Tell you what, you can stay with me if you let me have a taste.”
She looks miserable at this prospect. A misery that makes her so beautiful. “Where do you live?”
“Fairview. A trailer home.”
She considers this. Snow accumulates on the windshield, darkening the interior.
“This ain’t about me doing you, right? I don’t do that.”
All you’re thinking about is that bag of white powder in her hand, a rib eye steak to your salivating dog.
“Nothing like that, girl. Just wanna get high. You can have the couch.”
She has a spoon, a bottle of water, a syringe, a lighter. She has a piece of rubber tubing. She lets you go first. You’ve got the veins for this, as they say, and when the blood blossoms into the potion and then pushes back into your bloodstream, you don’t even have to wait for her to take the needle from you. You are bliss. You are warmth. You are light.
The world is radiant and sublime. There is no joke being played on you. There is no valley of bones. There is only this wonderful womb, this place of peace and awe. She’s fixed the next needle and gone about her own journey. Her hand slips over and takes yours. The idle of the car mingles with the sound of the wind, and it’s beautiful. Everything is so fucking beautiful it hurts.
As the snow piles on the windshield and the car goes dark, a memory comes to you: of Christmas, a tree you and your mother decorated, wrapped in multicolored lights and sparkly green ribbon and snowflake ornaments. The gleam of wrapping paper as it catches all the sources of illumination.
Chips of light filter through the storm. Christmas Day nears, and the snow continues to fall, until it feels like a thick curtain closing over the earth.
VANITY FAIR
KATE CHAOS AND THE PLANET’S LAST STAND
Once an anonymous foot soldier in an underfunded climate justice group, Kate Morris and A Fierce Blue Fire defied party politics, upended the midterm elections, and have reignited momentum on the climate crisis. Moniza Farooki profiles the frank, funny, fearless woman who has stormed to the front of the movement—even though she may not be welcome there.
BY MONIZA FAROOKI
DECEMBER 13, 2026
For those who’ve attempted to look away from the global cataclysm unfolding before their eyes, reality is finally descending. The news of the past year has been so grim, so terrifying, that it saturates the headlines and deadens the will. From apocalyptic western wildfires that incinerate entire sleeping towns before an alarm so much as sounds to Hurricane Alberto wiping Virginia Beach off the map to the Come to Jesus Storm killing dozens and plunging millions into cold and darkness across the Midwest, it is difficult not to despair. In that context Kate Morris’s demeanor can feel offensively incongruous to the moment.
“I get that we’re supposed to be funereal at all times, that joking about civilization-ending doom will get you excommunicated by the Twitterati, but if you think about it, this is all kind of funny. Don’t write that down, bitch!” she quickly adds, and then begins laughing loudly at herself.
We’re on the South Phoenix campus of Morris’s organization, A Fierce Blue Fire—what the group calls one of its “Outposts.” It includes a community center, urban garden, water recycling system, solar arrays, and vertical wind turbines. Heroin addicts wander the grounds, taking advantage of the addiction services and counseling.
“Our idea is that it’s fucking gut-check time,” Morris continues. “Nothing has worked so far. So it’s time to throw everything at the wall, leave everything on the field, knock down doors, get into the streets, get into the towns, and here’s a wild idea, even talk to people you disagree with. Personally, I think that requires some motherfucking gallows humor to keep your shit level, but to each her own, right?”
Until six months ago, no one but a handful of infighting climate activists even knew who Kate Morris was. Now she takes fire from all sides. She’s been called, among other things, “a feminist traitor making nice with Trump country,” and “the manic pixie dream girl of global warming.” The vitriol is obviously more extreme on the right after A Fierce Blue Fire made a raucous intrusion in the 2026 midterms. Now Morris is escaping D.C. to barnstorm the country in her dust-encased Nissan Leaf, energizing the troops. She claims she’s long harbored a dread of the spotlight.
“I get it. I get why people look at me like, ‘I’m fucking sick of these whacky socialist bitches trying to take away my hamburger.’ Hell, even I’m sick of Greta! I’m sick of AOC! I’m sick of the perverse media logic that takes this elemental emergency and juices it through the filter of celebrity at every opportunity. But we can’t stop. None of us can stop. We have to circumvent the culture wars, get past personalities, and build a multiyear, even multi-decadal, movement.”
An unbuttoned flannel flaps in the wind. Her skin has the weathered quality of a woman who’s spent a great deal of time in sun and dry air. She never wears makeup. Her curls must require maintenance, though, and her hands never leave them alone, always sweeping, tugging, or corralling. She tends to be fidgety and wired, careening from topic to topic. Her stories never cohere or conclude. She frequently gives me instructions to meet her in cities that she’s already left. She smiles.
“It’s pretty simple: We fight to the fucked and bitter end or we die.”
The founding of A Fierce Blue Fire dates to the tumultuous final year of the Trump administration when Morris and Harvard computer scientist Liza Yudong departed the climate advocacy organization that had brought them both to D.C. They wanted to build their own platform.
“The trauma of that time, especially the storming of the Capitol, lit a new fire under me,” says Morris. At that point, her only experience was at a small bison advocacy group in Wyoming and a few years of fundraising for climate action. She and Yudong utilized connections to environmentalism’s financial elite, billionaire families with familiar names, while also building a formidable small-dollar donation machine on the new social VR platforms. They were determined to expand beyond the strategy of running primary challenges against Democrats with fossil-fuel ties.
Yudong explains: “Kate mostly has weird or bad ideas. That’s your starting point with her.” Yudong is possibly the most meta-sardonic person I’ve ever interviewed, dressing up her intellect in an ironic veneer so thick it’s almost impossible to pinpoint where her actual personality lies. “But then Kate’ll be like, ‘Hey, Liz, let’s build the new world from the ashes of the old. Find me some places where we can build solar panel basketball courts and hold roots-rock concerts.’ There’s an uncomfortable amount of roots-rock.”
This is how the idea of the Outposts began: taking the values of climate justice into communities abandoned as ecological or economic sacrifice zones. Staff, money, and volunteers began to flood into places like Flint, Michigan; Kemmerer, Wyoming; and Zanesville, Ohio. Amid decay they’ve built jewels of renewable energy, open green space, concert venues, addiction services, and small farms. Out of thin air, they create a vocal stakeholder, with roots in the community, waging a perpetual influence campaign on the district’s congressperson and the state’s public utility commission—a board of influential decision-makers in each state who have their hands on the levers of enormous amounts of carbon energy. They’ve also fostered a growing mutual aid network that springs to work after disasters. During the Come to Jesus polar storm that killed ninety-three people in seven states last Christmas, FBF used its vast peer-to-peer organizing app to crowdsource food, water, and shelter for those stranded in subzero homes or on highways.
“My thinking is,” said Morris, “even if we don’t win a political race, at least we’re giving people a vision of what’s possible. We teach kids how to grow a tomato. But to grow a tomato, you have to know about the weather, and to know about the weather you have to intimately understand what is happening to our climate. Fossil-fuel capitalism makes us feel atomized and isolated. Growing tomatoes and roots-rock makes us feel together.”
IF THIS WAS ALL MORRIS and FBF were doing it would be remarkable, but it is not what has propelled her into the public eye and earned her the nickname “the Rottweiler of the climate crisis.” She garnered this notoriety by putting an unthinkable head on a pike for all Democrats to see.
Senator Elmer Nolan was a five-term West Virginia legend, who’d long championed coal and gas interests in the hydrocarbon state and survived the state’s lurch toward right-wing politics. Then FBF began its primary challenge.
One source intimate with that contentious campaign said that Morris sat across from Nolan at an early meeting and “told him point-blank that if he didn’t agree to back the GND, her candidate might not win, but Nolan would never make it back to the Senate again. Morris told Elmer to get with her program or she’d take his scalp. And she did.”
The result, some might argue, was catastrophe. In the general election, the precious Democratic Senate seat swung to Republican challenger Russ Mackowski, a neo-Confederate, hard-core climate denialist of the first order. Mackowski is now considered a leader of the hard right wing of the party.
Embattled president Joanna Hogan is apparently furious at the loss of Nolan, her Senate majority, and several key allies in the House. One source, close to the White House and speaking anonymously for reasons that will become obvious, had the following to say:
“You want my opinion of [Morris]? She’s a toxic cunt.”
The source went on. “She ousted Nolan, and now we’re going to have Mackowski, who’s not just a climate denier but practically a Holocaust denier. Not to mention her eco-socialist recruits in our party are all zealots you can’t work with. She’s torching [the Democrats] at a time when demographically we should be ascendant and when the other party has an openly fascist wing.”
Since Morris arrived on the scene, the apostasies of A Fierce Blue Fire have stoked controversy: She allies with pro-life groups; she decries antinuclear activists as “climate denialists in their own right”; and she once called President Hogan’s version of the Green New Deal “a five-trillion-dollar healthcare bill with a green coat of paint.” Yet nothing has stirred more outrage than FBF’s strategy of aggressively recruiting, cultivating, and supporting Republican candidates to run primary challenges. Forget about stances on abortion rights, gun control, LGBTQIAA+ issues. All these Republican challengers have to do to access FBF’s money is run campaigns based on “the scientific consensus of anthropogenic climate change” and pledge to vote affirmatively on FBF’s model legislation.
“People are going ape, sure, and maybe they’re not wrong,” says Morris. “But I’ve come to believe there are limits to activating the hard core, that what we were building was a clubhouse rather than a movement. Self-sorting political behavior is toxic, not just for QAnon dweebs but for the Left as well, because we have to create a durable, sustainable governing consensus. It’s shortsighted to ignore people who vote Republican by habit. We have a moral duty to talk to people we disagree with. We have to build on-ramps to the movement.”
Many viewed entering the Republican civil war in the post-Trump era as a fool’s errand, but Morris has proved them wrong. The House now includes a “Green Tea” caucus, and Republican senator Ryan Doup, widely expected to become Senate majority leader, has promised action on climate. The unambiguous victor of this strategy is, of course, Mary Randall. The thirty-nine-year-old Republican came from the dredges of the statehouse in Albany and will become the first woman of color to occupy the governor’s mansion in New York history. Poised, confident, and a full-throated advocate of action on climate change, Randall is already being championed by Republican moderates as a candidate for 2028 when the field will be anybody’s game. It’s no secret that Randall got a huge bump from FBF’s Super PAC, which enraged some on the left: Randall, a Black woman, is also devoutly Catholic and a pro-life conservative.
“I don’t necessarily endorse every last policy prescription from those folks,” Randall told CBS’s Face the Nation. “But we have a wide array of tools available within our free-market system to cut emissions and arrest the climate crisis. True conservatives have already left denialism in the dustbin of history because they see the enormous economic opportunities presented by the zero-emissions revolution. It’s already begun. Now it’s just a matter of how quickly we move and who is going to capitalize on it.”
Meanwhile, the Left continues its vexed relationship with the current commander-in-chief. While pursuing only meager efforts on climate, Joanna Hogan has had her time in office consumed by global chaos. She’s vastly increased troop levels across the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North Africa, approved hundreds more drone strikes than Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden combined, ramped up deportations, increased the military presence at the US-Mexico border, and opened people’s data to new heights of exploitation by signing the Freedom of Data and Corporate Accountability Act. She’s also embraced the “eco-terrorist” label for the pipeline saboteurs and applauded the heavy sentence of a college student who planted an explosive in Colorado. Perhaps most importantly, she’s spoken with exasperation and occasional scorn for youth-led movements like A Fierce Blue Fire for their “pie-in-the-sky, gimme-gimme, baby-wanna-bottle attitude” as she infamously told a reporter following the abandonment of climate legislation early in her term.
This is in stark contrast to Governor-elect Randall.
When I ask Morris if she would support Mary Randall as a presidential candidate, Morris responds, “Depends. She’s talked a good game, but if it comes down to it, will she bite the chain saw? Hard to say.”
But can it be a coincidence that FBF’s model legislation bears a striking resemblance to a policy touted by Randall, which she calls “the Green Trident”?
“Oh my god, that name is brutal,” says Morris. “I just don’t want to hear the word ‘green’ attached to anything ever a-fucking-gain. Besides, it’s a total misnomer. During extinction events, the oceans acidify, carbonate-forming species get wiped out, and it’s all replaced by green plankton. ‘Disaster plankton’ scientists call it. The oceans bloom with that shit. After the end-Triassic, the whole planet turned green. And that’s what it’ll look like again—a muddy tennis ball—unless we stop it. That’s why we monkeyed with the Phil Shabecoff phrase for our name, because green, at this point, is a dead fucking brand.”
FROM WHAT PRIMORDIAL AMERICAN STEW DID MORRIS ARISE?
She is tight-lipped about her father, Earl Morris, an antinuclear activist, who spent a year in prison on trespassing and vandalism charges. Social and political engagement courses through her blood: Earl was the son of a Navajo schoolteacher and a Jamaican civil rights lawyer. Earl’s uncle, Mervyn Morris, was Jamaica’s poet laureate. Kate’s mother, Sonja Sundstrom, came to the US from Sweden on a student visa and never left. Sonja and Earl separated in 2006, and Kate moved with her mother to Portland. Her father and two younger brothers still live in Arizona, but she won’t allow me an interview, and the situation smells of tension.
In Portland, however, I convince her to let me sit down with her mother.
Sundstrom looks like a mythical Nordic matriarch: tall with bleach-white hair that hangs down to the small of her back. She lives in a two-bedroom bungalow in Beaverton and works for the Columbia River Cooperative. She has a great deal to vent about her daughter.
“Kate has always been the most stubborn, most hard-headed girl,” she says, her English carrying a crisp accent. “When she was young we fought all the time about everything. Not like mean, nasty ‘I hate you, I hate you’ fighting. We just argued. I only argue because I don’t want her to do stupid things.”
For instance, she points to her daughter’s 2016 arrest during the Dakota Access Pipeline protest.
“Go to jail if you want, just like your father. I tell Matthew he can’t get arrested.” She refers to Morris’s longtime partner, Matthew Stanton, who works under Morris at FBF. “ ‘You get ready to rescue her as soon as she screws up too bad.’ ”
I ask Sundstrom what she thinks of her daughter’s rise to prominence.
“Oh, she needs to stop wearing so many tight outfits.”
I ask how that is relevant.
“Kate gets what she wants. So maybe she’ll get what she wants this time, like always, and she’ll save the world. But I keep telling her she’s making many people angry and horny. It’s a bad combination. Are you a mother? I’ll tell you being a mother is just worry—especially if you have a crazy person for a daughter. When she was a teenager Kate would run away from home for weeks at a time, never tell me where she was going, who she was with, always scaring me. But Matthew is the finest thing to ever happen to her. I told him, if she’s ever stupid and decides to leave him, he can come be my son.”
