Howdy, Dear advocate,

You've probably seen the intense photos from Asheville, North Carolina — a mountain town in Appalachia left in ruins by the tail end of Hurricane Helene. You've likely read the headlines — at least 130 people dead in six states and hundreds more missing in this latest climate-change-intensified storm.

As the grim news from this unnatural disaster trickled into my newsfeed over the weekend, I knew that we here at Sierra magazine had to find a way to cover the story. As the storytelling arm of the Sierra Club, it's our duty to make sure that people understand the connections between the burning of fossil fuels, a warming atmosphere and overheating oceans, and deadly storms like Helene. It's our responsibility to share the stories of communities affected by climate change so that we can all bear witness to the human impacts of our reckless fossil fuel dependence and move together toward real action.

So I was glad when I made contact with Jessica Wakeman, a former reporter for Asheville's community newspaper, who said she was eager to share her community's story with our national audience.

On Tuesday morning — as people in Asheville were still scrambling to access basic necessities like food, clean drinking water, and electricity — we published Jessica's article, No Community Is a Climate Refuge: A Reporter's Notebook From Asheville, North Carolina.

Jessica writes:

“Even with limited connectivity—the best places to get wi-fi are the public library branches, where hundreds gather outside to pick up a signal—many of us here have been able to tune into the national chatter expressing surprise that even a supposed “climate haven” like ours could be hit so hard by the tail end of a hurricane. We're more than 300 miles from the coast, at 2,000 feet above sea level, yet this unnatural disaster walloped us anyway…

The truth is that no community is a climate refuge, despite what opportunistic real estate agents might say. Climate change has already impacted western North Carolina's wildlife, water temperatures, and growing seasons. And while some of the more well-heeled ‘climate refugees' may not have noticed those impacts unless they looked closely, this catastrophic weather event is impossible to ignore.”

Jessica goes on to report about how her community has come together to survive this crisis. Neighbors are helping neighbors: sharing water, sharing food, hooking each other up with enough electricity to charge their phones and stay in touch with loved ones.

Reporting like this matters. In a time of ever-worsening climate disasters, the mainstream media is failing to make the connection. In the last few days, only 3 percent of all national TV news segments about Hurricane Helene mentioned climate change, according to the watchdog group Media Matters. Disasters like this aren't just a tragedy—they are a crime committed by the fossil fuel barons who insist on squeezing every last dollar out of oil and gas, no matter the cost to everyday people and our communities.

And they will continue to become more frequent and more extreme. Unless we act.

So please keep reading. Keep up the advocacy. Keep giving, in whatever way you can. And keep in touch—because we're all in this together.

Onward ever,

Jason Mark Editor in Chief Sierra

PS: If you’re able, please consider making a donation to one of our partner organizations working on the ground to help communities recover after Hurricane Helene.