The Magazine of The Sierra Club
It's Zombies Versus Coal in East Oakland
For Angelika Soriano, a prospective coal terminal sounded horrifying
Angelika Soriano and other youth activists have worked to halt a proposed coal terminal. | Photo by Lori Eanes
When she was 12, Angelika Soriano came across a YouTube video about climate change. It explained how our planet's rising temperatures correspond with the burning of fossil fuels and warned that humans might not survive this drastic warming. The more she thought about the video, the more anxious she became.
Soriano talked to her friends about climate change, but it didn't seem to worry them much. Her sixth-grade teacher suggested she connect with some youth activists who were fighting a coal terminal proposed for the Port of Oakland. A Bay Area developer planned to ship Utah coal to the port and then on to overseas markets.
As Soriano learned more, she started to realize how harmful fossil-fuel-generated air pollutants are to human health, and the effort to block the port became more personal. She and her sister have struggled with the symptoms of asthma, as have many people where she lives in East Oakland. Situated along a corridor with the highest volume of trucking traffic in the Bay Area, East Oakland already has significantly higher levels of air pollution than the rest of the region. "What really scares me the most is the possibility of coal dust flying off the trains and spreading," Soriano says.
For months, she and other youth activists tried to get the developer, Phil Tagami, to meet with them. On the night before Halloween in 2017, she and about 200 other people protested outside Tagami's house. They covered themselves in ashy face paint and fake blood and declared themselves coal zombies. "We got the idea of dressing up as zombies as a way of saying we might be killed by coal," Soriano says.
In November 2018, the city of Oakland canceled the lease for the terminal. Tagami has sued the city twice for blocking the project, but construction hasn't started. At 14, Soriano feels less nervous than she used to. "Becoming an activist," she says, "helped with the stress I felt when I was . . . full of worries about the climate."
This article appeared in the September/October 2019 edition with the headline "Zombies Versus Coal."
Breathless by the Bay In Alameda County (which includes Oakland), 14 percent of residents suffer from asthma—approximately double the national average.
This article was funded by the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign.
