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.”
The rest of the interview is spent allowing Sundstrom’s inexhaustible repository of opinions about her daughter to spool out. Her nickname for Kate catches my attention.
“I call her Kate Chaos because that’s what she’s like to be with. All the time, her and chaos holding hands. She loves it, she causes it, she is it.”
BEFORE JOINING HER ON THE ROAD, I FIRST MET MORRIS IN WASHington, D.C., where she indulged me with a tour of A Fierce Blue Fire’s offices in Adams Morgan. Organizers drank from a keg midday, propped feet on carboard boxes, and flitted digits across five screens at once. All their work takes place beneath an enormous mural, a quote emerging from a conflagration of blue flames: PATHWALKER, THERE IS NO PATH. YOU MAKE THE PATH AS YOU WALK.
Morris has proven adept at siphoning talent from other organizations. Rekia Reynolds, twenty-five, grew up in Englewood, on Chicago’s South Side, and went on to graduate at the top of her high school class and receive a scholarship to Northwestern.
Reynolds said it was an environmental science class that first alerted her to inequities she had not considered before. “I got my head spun by this professor who was talking about air quality on the South Side, and I was like, ‘Yes, that was me!’ Everyone I knew had some respiratory issue growing up.”
Reynolds never considered environmentalism or the climate crisis as having any impact on her life.
“I thought it was about white people telling you to take the bus and never drive a car. I was like, ‘Fuck you, you take the bus—I’m buying a ride.’ But a lot of that comes from never having seen anyone in this movement who looked like me. It was all rich people hectoring. But the fact is, when you talk about structural racism, there is no greater purveyor or promoter than the fossil-fuel lobby and other polluting industries—not just the right-wing politicians they sponsor—because their products poison Black and brown people. They use our communities as dumping grounds.”
Reynolds now does environmental justice outreach, a huge portfolio that includes everything from organizing and registering Black voters to coordinating with lawyers to file lawsuits against corporate polluters.
“Yeah, I’m here ’cause of the white girl,” she jokes with a sly shift of her eyes to Kate. “Kate and I work well because we’re both alphas, both big personalities, both Aries, so we can knock heads and then be chill almost twenty minutes later. But she is the one who convinced me that we need to connect these movements, BLM and the climate crisis, because they are absolutely the same fight.”
Tom Levine, a Hill veteran, began his career in Nancy Pelosi’s office before moving on to hold a number of jobs in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. A muscular southern Jewish boy, he wears thick-rimmed hipster glasses and speaks with the slight drawl of his native Alabama.
“I’ve been around long enough, I remember the death of cap-and-trade, let alone the stomach ulcers of the Biden-Harris years. We fought a war for the Inflation Reduction Act only to discover that all carrots and no stick won’t cut it. Turns out you need the stick. I thought Jo Hogan was going to take a swing at climate legislation first thing. When that didn’t happen, I jumped ship and went to work for the barbarians. So, I lost my good apartment and my girlfriend left me for a lobbyist.” He spits into an empty Red Bull can, and I realize he has chewing tobacco in his mouth. “That’s all part and parcel for this town, so maybe I’m a double agent—maybe I’m just trying to drown this miserable fucking city.”
Coral Sloane was recruited from a think tank to serve as FBF policy director.
“The Chewbacca to Kate’s Han Solo,” jokes Sloane. Sleeved in tattoos with a bowl of messy orange hair and a lip ring that gets in the way of their every word, Sloane is a graduate of Yale and the Harvard Kennedy School, where they did their master’s in public policy. Sloane is a super-wonk who has helped draft their three-pronged model legislation. They believe any policy should lead with a pledge to the workers who’ve proven most resistant to the end of fossil fuels.
“Job security, a union, health insurance, a pension—people fight to keep all that for good reason. For communities battered by scarcity, they don’t want to see one more plant or business close ever again. We want to guarantee that on the other side of the carbon economy is something better for working people.”
A clean electricity standard, a zero-emissions vehicle mandate, and the shuttering of all coal plants by 2030 are the low-hanging fruit. A ten-trillion-dollar investment over ten years will pay for the “big-ticket items of deep decarbonization,” like reducing transportation and industrial emissions. This also includes what they call the “1,000 Counties Project,” which will direct half the money to the poorest and most environmentally degraded counties in the country. Much of this is old hat to GND-heads, but the final component of the legislation is something new, a hybrid proposal that has the climate policy world buzzing. “The central problem of climate action of the 2020s is that emissions have not fallen,” says Sloane. “Even as renewables have become cheap, accessible, and ubiquitous, the Carbon Majors are still reaping huge profits. Carbon pricing got a bad rap as a half measure, but it’s only a half measure if it’s weak.”