We’ve had enough.
From Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley to the Gulf South and beyond, fossil fuels and petrochemicals threaten the health of our families, communities, and our children’s future.
We Refuse To Die.
SEE OUR BILLBOARDS & take actionFrom Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley to the Gulf South and beyond, fossil fuels and petrochemicals threaten the health of our families, communities, and our children’s future.
Across the country, Black, Latinx, Indigenous and poor white communities living near refineries, pipelines, fracking sites, and other polluting infrastructure experience disproportionate rates of asthma, rare cancers, and other terminal illness. In the western United States, wildfires cover communities in toxic smoke and ravage the more-than-human world, destroying homes and habitats. Forced to live in unlivable conditions, humans and other species are cast as the living dead. With We Refuse to Die, the living dead speak back.
Incorporating visual art produced for both museum and outdoor exhibition, public rituals, gatherings within and across communities, and artistic visuals for performances, public hearings, and protest, this multi-year, multi-city project pushes back against the dominant representation of so-called “sacrifice zones” as sites of powerlessness and victimization.
In coalition with communities on the frontlines of climate and environmental justice struggles, We Refuse to Die forges new solidarities—across generations, species, and geographies, metabolizing grief into collective strength and community power.
With We Refuse to Die, the living dead speak back—forging a coalition of the living and the dead, in which the ancestors are not simply victims of industrial pollution, but allies and agents of change.
With We Refuse to Die, the living dead speak back—forging a coalition of the living and the dead, in which the ancestors are not simply victims of industrial pollution, but allies and agents of change.
In September 2020, the community of Breitenbush in Detroit, Oregon was devastated by the convergence of two climate-fueled wildfires that ripped through the property, ravaging homes and habitat. And yet, from ashes rise aspirations, and the community rebuilds. In 2023, members of the art collective Not An Alternative (also known as The Natural History Museum—a traveling “museum for the movement”) joined members of the Breitenbush community to salvage trees killed in the wildfires.
Over the coming years, the trees will stand again, reborn as outdoor monuments called Externalities, hand-carved and installed in Gulf South and Appalachian yards, facing the petrochemical plants and fossil fuel facilities that cause local and global harm.
We Refuse To Die debuted in Fall, 2023 in an exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a week-long convening with 30 frontline community partners from the Gulf South and Appalachia.
Featuring “toxic tours”, demonstrations, billboards, and guerilla art projections, the grassroots gathering culminated in the first permanent installation of an Externality monument.
