“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.”