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The Atlantic, AUG 22, 2018  In the new global reality, where each passing year is the hottest on record, the final month of summer foretells calamity. It’s always hot and volatile in the dog days between mid-August and mid-September, but the past few years have dialed those elements up high. Heat waves, droughts, storms, floods, and other extreme events have garnered increasing attention. The largest wildfire in California’s history is now raging almost a year after the previous record holder hit the state. Hurricanes Harvey and Irma ravaged the Gulf Coast and Florida in late August last year. Hurricane Maria became the second-most deadly natural disaster in contemporary American history when it passed over Puerto Rico last September. And the 13th anniversary of the Louisiana landfall of Hurricane Katrina, the largest such storm, is on August 29.Climate change is not a future problem. Climate change is a current problem. Yet the United States—despite this recent history—has pulled back from a number of already insufficient commitments to reversing emissions and global warming. Faced with this vacuum, American nongovernmental organizations and states have stepped forward with campaigns designed to reinvigorate climate activism and policy making. But they have a long way to go, especially in connecting a mainstream climate movement with the majority of the victims of those disasters.

One of the major initiatives put together as President Donald Trump began to withdraw the White House from climate leadership is the Global Climate Action Summit, which will take place in September. “This summit’s happening in San Francisco, California, but it’s something that was requested several years ago by the United Nations,” says Nick Nuttall, the summit’s spokesman. A collective of non-state actors organized the event, Nuttall says, with the goal of “bring[ing] together leaders from state and local governments, business, and citizens from around the world to demonstrate how the tide has turned in the race against climate change.” As Nuttall told me, the general idea is to recapture the energy that preceded the 2015 Paris climate agreement, in which most of the world’s countries agreed to pursue policies that would curb global temperature growth to well under 2 degrees Celsius.*

Why the wildfires of 2018 have been so ferocious

However, the problem with many climate summits—and much of the mainstream climate movement, generally—is that many of them focus on a future target, planning for and attempting to avert doomsday scenarios that might play out over the course of decades or a century. The mainstream paradigm often views climate change as a collective risk, and pushes people to action by selling fears of future societal collapse and environmental ruin. Both can be averted if politicians and people work together and with urgency, the common argument goes; if we all pitch in, we can avoid the worst.

As the fallout from Harvey, Irma, and Maria shows, though, that argument is false. The suffering caused by a warming and more temperamental environment is already happening, and it isn’t distributed equally, nor will it be. From the poor people in Vieques, Puerto Rico, who still face uncertain medical care and unstable electricity after Maria, to black and Latino communities severed from dialysis services in Houston during Harvey, if there’s anything the current climate regime tells us, it’s that vulnerable populations are already in trouble.

But as the anniversaries of America’s most infamous climate disasters come around once again, there are real efforts by a loose network of veteran environmental-justice leaders and groups across the country to spread the gospel of climate justice in this moment of crisis.