Climate change, and especially wildfires, are impacting more and more people across North America and around the world. House On Fire: Housing & Climate Crisis, Housing & Climate Resistance asks: How is climate change affecting people living unhoused in the US? How are homeless communities finding ways to survive, thrive, and fight for more just futures?
This 20-page illustrated zine draws on interviews with 50+ unhoused community members and supporters and a decade of participation in the homeless-led movement to de-criminalize racialized poverty and fight for housing for all. House On Fire argues that to understand how climate change impacts life for folks living unhoused, it is necessary to look beyond proximate environmental threats and impacts. A focus on (wild)fire reveals that policing and the carceral system, vigilante violence, and a commodified land and housing system have as much to do with climate injustice for unhoused people as winter storms and heatwaves. All of this occurs within a larger historical and present-day context of white supremacy and settler colonialism, with uneven impacts falling along predictable lines of race, gender, disability, immigration status, and other categories of difference. In the midst of housing and climate crisis, members of these groups are leading the way toward more just land relations, demonstrating what alternative housing and climate futures could look like for all.
House On Fire is part of a larger project called RESTING SAFE. RESTING SAFE was co-created by the Antipode Foundation’s Scholar-Activist Project Award and Right to the Discipline grant* awardee Erin Goodling, in collaboration with members of the Portland, Oregon-based group Right 2 Survive. RESTING SAFE brings together houseless community leaders and activist scholars to fight for environmental and climate justice in the places where houseless people are building communities. Check out RESTING SAFE’s “Environmental Justice Toolkit” and other publications on their website. And stay tuned for a full-length illustrated graphic novel version of House On Fire in the next few years! Email [email protected] to be in touch.
*Watch this space for a call for proposals—the Right to the Discipline grants will be back for 2022/23!