Portfolio / L.F.A.

Southern Environmental Law Center • 5th September 2024

The Strip Mine and The Swamp

Have you ever been to a place that is so ecologically intact that it just feels timeless? Shannon Byrne: This is like being in, I don’t know, like the Galapagos, like, like Darwin’s lab. Like, you can spread your thoughts out. It’s just, uh,...

The Guardian • 4th March 2024

‘We are the guinea pigs’: Arizona mining project sparks concerns for air and water

Growing up on both sides of the Arizona-Mexico border, Denise Moreno Ramírez got respite from the border town bustle by hiking through sycamore and juniper trees in the mountains near her home. These isolated mountains – known as the Sky Islands –...

The Guardian • 16th December 2021

A ‘false solution’? How crypto mining became the oil industry’s new hope

In January of 2019, Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness, recently reunited prep school pals from Denver, drove out to the snow-covered plains of Wyoming to bring a piece of tech culture to the American heartland. Trembling in -20F (-29C) temperatures,...

Truthout • 30th January 2023

Migrant Farmworkers Have No Safety Net in the Face of Catastrophic Flooding

Many farmworkers are still out of work and struggling to afford food in the wake of California’s disastrous floods. Workers in California who grow and pick the majority of fruits and nuts in the United States are experiencing an acute crisis of un-...

New York Focus • 13th September 2022

The Price of Private Equity’s New York Power Plant Grab

In November 2021, without fanfare, and having received no public comments, the New York Public Service Commission (PSC) issued a succinct declaratory ruling enabling a new company called Generation Bridge LLC to absorb a massive fossil fuel-burning...

Truthout • 1st March 2023

Billions Are Available to Tackle Environmental Racism. Where Is the Money Going?

Two years after President Biden’s bold commitment to center under-resourced communities and racial justice in curbing the climate crisis, the funding capable of doing so is materializing — millions at a time — and on an almost daily basis.

Truthout • 10th January 2024

Famine in Gaza Is a Culmination of Israel’s Long War on Palestine’s Food System

As of this week, the top emergency relief official for the United Nations, Martin Griffiths, deemed Gaza all but “uninhabitable,” with its 2.2 million residents facing the “highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded.” Experts have attributed the...

Broken Ground • 20th September 2023

Meet the storytellers reimagining how we get our news

Amid a shifting media landscape, and the shuttering of local newspapers, writers, editors, and photographers across the South are reconsidering how communities stay informed. This season, host Leanna First-Arai talks with journalists and creators...

The Margin • 4th October 2022

We glow in the dark

It was October 1995, just as the cool evenings set in, in Memphis, Tennessee, when things began making sense to Doris Bradshaw. Earlier that year, her 84-year-old grandmother, Susie Hall, had found a few drops of blood in her underwear.

Youth Today • 31st October 2022

'Every day was a bad day': Children working in agriculture aren’t protected equally

Jose Velasquez, 20, was only eight years old when he got his first job picking blueberries on a farm outside of Goldsboro, North Carolina. He was tasked with helping his mother fill up buckets of berries, then running them up the row. There, a crew...

Broken Ground • 3rd July 2022

How Memphians Defeated a Pipeline

This season as we head to Boxtown, in Memphis, Tennessee to uncover how a historically Black community and its allies secured a victory once thought impossible, defeating corporate efforts to construct a crude oil pipeline.

The Guardian • 4th May 2022

How the oil and gas industry is trying to hold US public schools hostage

The oil and gas industry wants to play a word-and-picture association game with you. Think of four images: a brightly colored backpack stuffed with pencils, a smiling teacher with a tablet tucked under her arm, a pair of glasses resting on a stack of...

Teen Vogue • 25th July 2022

Young Workers Are Bridging the Climate and Labor Movements

This piece originally appeared in Truthout. It is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. New momentum is buzzing through the North American labor movement,...

Truthout • 14th February 2022

Here’s How the Biden Administration Can Prevent Needless Deaths From Pollution

One year after a newly inaugurated President Biden committed to activating every bough of the government to address the climate crisis and a legacy of racial and environmental injustice — in Executive Order 14008 — elements of that elegant order are...

Truthout • 9th April 2022

Great Plains Farmers Push Back Against CO2 Pipelines Encroaching on Their Land

Farmers, ranchers, and other rural community members across five Great Plains states and Illinois — many of whom were previously sued by developers of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines wanting to build through their land — are finding their...

Youth Today • 29th November 2022

Youth take lead in mapping heat impacts

Growing up in arid Santa Paula, California, an oil town filled with citrus groves, Fabiola Gomez Flores had tricks for dodging the heat. Like many people she knew, her family lived in an apartment without air conditioning, so sometimes, on the hottest...

Truthout • 14th July 2022

70,000 Acres of Federal Land Were Just Handed to the Fossil Fuel Sector

In direct violation of warnings by the International Energy Agency that new oil, gas and coal development should have ceased in 2021, and by UN Secretary General António Guterres that government support for fossil fuel production is “delusional,” the...

The Guardian • 27th May 2022

They once worked for big oil’s enablers. Now they refuse to be complicit

More than a century ago, fossil fuel firms hardly needed help maintaining their image. Coal-powered trains, oil-burning power plants and gas-heated houses were likened to patriotism and social progress. But over time, especially as industry scientists...

Truthout • 27th September 2022

Biden Promised "Good-Paying Union Jobs," But It Will Take Organizing to Get Them

Since the historic and controversial Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was signed into law in August, the economy has begun showing early signs of shifting and recalibrating beneath our feet.

Truthout • 13th March 2022

Western US’s Worst Drought in 1,200 Years Brings Year-Long Fire Season

Ten weeks after the wind-whipped Marshall fire blasted through Boulder County, Colorado, on December 30, taking with it one man’s life and over 1,000 houses, some residents with the means to do so are now preparing to build back.