Mother Jones

On the Cover In 2008, Bill McKibben wrote “The Most Important Number on Earth” for us and launched 350.org. Now, he says progressives must learn to embrace a green building boom. Justin Metz whimsically captures the paradigm shift. Contributors Other than the work you do now, what was your dream job growing up? I actually thought I wanted to be a librarian, which I’m looking back at in a new light after having written this piece. —Isabela Dias, author, “Teacher’s Pest” I wanted to follow in Spike Lee’s footsteps. He told stories with New York City as a backdrop. I was hoping to do the same for Washington, DC. —Octavio Jones, photographer, “Teacher’s Pest” I wanted to be a magician, but I was never smooth enough. Still can’t properly shuffle a deck.—Maggie Duffy, co-author, “Watching the…

IN MARCH, “Save Lafayette” finally lost a long-running battle to stop a 315-unit affordable housing complex from being built in Lafayette, an affluent city near Oakland, California. From a climate perspective, the spot was ideal: on a former quarry, next to a high school, close to mass transit. Sixty-three units—20 percent—were set aside for low-income households. But the group of “Lafayette residents who support our City’s historic character” objected to “excessive urbanization that overcrowds our schools, causes massive traffic congestion, worsens parking problems, and threatens our health and safety.” Like every community in the Bay Area, Lafayette has been building nowhere near enough units to meet its state housing requirements. As the developer of the Terraces battled opponents, the city offered a different way: Instead of 315 mixed-income units, what about…

ONE NIGHT IN late January, Los Angeles’ brand new controller, Kenneth Mejia, zipped up an official windbreaker with a city seal on the left breast, and walked out of City Hall to police headquarters. Mejia, an athletic 32-year-old with a background in left-wing organizing, stood watching at the edge of a vigil to memorialize Tyre Nichols, whose deadly beating by Memphis cops had just been released on video. Officers and cruisers showed up en masse at the gathering, as they would at a series of demonstrations that unfolded over the next several days. Through it all, Mejia and his team did their job: They conducted “on-the-ground” monitoring, keeping eyes on the cops’ expensive show of force. In November, Mejia, who is Filipino American, won a sweeping victory with a data-based campaign…

IN NOVEMBER 2021, Victoria Conklin, a 23-year-old shift supervisor at a Starbucks near Buffalo, was talking to Rossann Williams, then the company’s president of North American retail. Workers at three nearby stores had recently petitioned to become the chain’s only unionized locations in the United States, but Conklin’s hadn’t. Williams wanted to keep it that way. As the company wrapped up its anti-union campaign, Williams told Conklin that a “special guest” was coming in for a big event. “It’s Howard Schultz,” Conklin responded. “Don’t act like it’s Taylor Swift or something.” Almost four decades before, Schultz had joined Starbucks as an operations and marketing executive. In 1987, he bought the company for $3.8 million, serving as CEO as it grew into the world’s largest coffee business. Starbucks is now worth more than…

THE TORAH TELLS its followers to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth,” so that’s what Lisa Sobel, a devout Jewish woman from Louisville, Kentucky, set out to do. It wasn’t easy. After more than three years of infertility, she and her husband embarked on a $50,000 IVF journey. Finally, after having to discard four embryos with genetic abnormalities, in April 2019, she delivered a healthy baby girl—and quickly began hemorrhaging. Sobel almost died. Now 39, Sobel wants another child. But after all that, what she says is keeping her from moving forward are the anti-abortion laws Kentucky enacted in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. It’s why she and two other Jewish women—both of whom also depend on in vitro fertilization to…

I’M AN ENVIRONMENTALIST, which means I’ve got some practice in saying no. It’s what we do: John Muir saying no to the destruction of Yosemite helped kick off environmentalism; Rachel Carson said no to DDT; the Sierra Club said no to the damming of the Grand Canyon. We’re often quite good at it, and thank heaven; I’ll go to my grave satisfied by, if nothing else, having played some part in stopping Big Oil from building the Keystone XL pipeline 1,700 miles across the heart of the continent. Right now I’m deeply engaged with American colleagues in trying to stop our big banks from funding fossil fuel expansion, and rooting on friends in Africa as they battle the giant EACOP pipeline, and watching with admiration as European confreres fight plans…