We live in a period of acute environmental crisis. When I began this project in the summer of 2017, large parts of my hometown of Houston, Texas were still underwater in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, a devastating storm that claimed over 100 lives in Texas and Louisiana and disrupted thousands more. Scientists studying Harvey's environmental impact have shown that human-caused “global warming made the precipitation about 15% (8%–19%) more intense,” in that hurricane than in previous years, and that climate change patterns “made such an event three (1.5–5) times more likely.” The next summer, the state of California erupted in wildfires, the worst in state history; again, over 100 people were killed, including six firefighters. Smoke from the fires carried for thousands of miles across the Pacific Northwest, bringing muddy yellow skies to my new home of Spokane, Washington. A subsequent study in the journal Earth's Future identified strong links between humancaused climate change and the increasing violence of California's wildfires, once again in warning that these trends are “extremely likely to continue for decades to come.” In Texas and across the West, the environmental and financial devastation which followed these crises was a stark reminder of the precarious relationship between humans and our environs.

And yet the spectacular violence of these environmental crises cannot overshadow the subtler systemic violence of environmental inequality; as I write in the first months of 2021, the deadly results of this inequality are impossible to ignore.