Here’s WhereYou Come In_You can’t solve the climate crisis alone. And we also
can’t solve it without you.
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BY Mary Annaïse Heglar ILLUSTRATION BY Alvaro Dominguez
ONE AFTERNOON IN DECEMBER, I TOOK THE
4 train from my home in the South Bronx
to an apartment near Union Square. I had
been invited to lead a conversation with a
handful of artists about the climate crisis
and their place in it.
What I found was an intimate gathering
of six or seven people. After some milling
about over plates of cake and mugs of coffee,
we started remembering Hurricane Sandy.
We marveled at how much our experiences
differed based on the borough or neighbor-
hood we lived in. Sandy turned the Lower
East Side—which was originally built for
low-income communities but is now fairly
affluent—into a place where police cars
were submerged and electricity was scarce.
Meanwhile, the South Bronx, originally built
for the affluent but now the poorest con-
gressional district in the country, came out
of the storm relatively unscathed, since it
sits on higher ground and is connected to
the mainland of New York state.
We wondered how long before another
Sandy—or something much, much worse,
perhaps something we don’t even have
language for yet—pushed the masses from
Lower Manhattan into the South Bronx.
Then where would my neighbors go?
From there, the conversation naturally
spiraled into the undercurrent of terror that
comes with being alive today. Australia was
ablaze, and the embers had barely cooled
in the Amazon. A typhoon was encroaching