What I saw in the Ohio community turned into a ghost town by coal pollution

If a coal plant started swamping your town with a fog of pollution so toxic that people struggled to breathe and the paint was stripped from cars, most of us would expect pressure to be on the power station’s owner to clean up its act.

Instead, for the people of the ghost town of Cheshire, Ohio, a startling and brutal alternative was settled on: the plant owner would buy the entire town, move people from their homes and then bulldoze all of the houses, a school and even a church.

When I visited the remnants of Cheshire recently, I found the impact of the community’s displacement, which took place in 2002, still feels raw. More on what I saw, after this week’s most important reads.

“I find it hard to come back here,” Megan Lawhon, who grew up in Cheshire, told me. The close-knit community was divided over the relocation, friendships were severed, insults shouted.

Still standing, though, is the power plant. The sulphuric acid mist that descended on Cheshire has gone, but this is still one of the most polluting facilities in the US and gives off a powerful stench that stings the nose, like violently rotten eggs. “It’s like a member of my family has been murdered and the killer was just allowed to pay out some money and that’s it,” Lawhon said.

The saga of the Gavin coal plant has gained fresh resonance amid the US presidential election, as the Donald Trump and JD Vance campaign is backed by the billionaire chief executive of Blackstone, a co-owner of the plant.

Trump, Vance and Blackstone have all battled regulations designed to protect people from the air and water pollution linked to coal. If elected again, Trump has vowed to kill off a Joe Biden-era rule requiring coal plants to slash their emissions by 90%, while Vance, who is an Ohio senator, has complained of “wanton harassment of fossil fuel companies” under Biden.

The situation in Cheshire highlights one of the sharpest disparities in the election – while Kamala Harris is seeking to follow Biden’s lead by phasing out unabated coal plants, Trump wants to remove any impediment to them.

Trump’s mantra on fossil fuels on the campaign trail has been “drill, baby, drill”, a welcome message in this part of Appalachia where the coal industry has long loomed large. Ohio, once a swing state, is expected to vote Republican for the third presidential election in a row, with support strong even in abandoned Cheshire, where a barn next to the Gavin plant features a large picture of Trump, shaking his fist.

The promise of new clean energy jobs is regularly laughed off here, while the threat of the climate crisis is also routinely dismissed, Lawhon told me. Amid a crucial election that will help determine if the world is able to avoid disastrous climate breakdown, ties to place and traditional industry triumph over almost all else in this corner of Ohio.

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Profiling an inspiring individual, suggested by Down to Earth readers

For a generation of millennials, one writer stands out as the one who awakened climate consciousness with them: David Wallace-Wells. The essayist, whose book The Uninhabitable Earth has been a bedside staple since its release in 2019, has a talent for explaining the complexities of climate science and conveying urgency of action.

“He makes the big and scary understandable,” writes one reader who nominated Wallace-Wells. “But he also somehow manages to give me hope.”

“Whatever we do to stop warming, and however aggressively we act to protect ourselves from its ravages, we will have pulled the devastation of human life on Earth into view,” Wallace-Wells wrote in the Guardian in 2019. “Close enough that we can see clearly what it would look like, and know, with some degree of precision, how it will punish our children and grandchildren.”

Nominated by reader Dominique Miles

If you’d like to nominate a climate hero, email downtoearth@theguardian.com

Demystifying a climate concept you’ve heard in the headlines

The phenomenon in which densely populated places tend to be significantly hotter than the rural areas around them, largely as a result of heat being trapped by buildings, tarmac, and fewer green areas.

For more Guardian coverage of urban heat islands, click here

One image that sums up the week in environmental news

Credit: Reuters

For centuries, the Darién Gap – a 60 mile-wide strip of land bordering southern Panama and northern Colombia, which joins North and South America – has been a lifeline for the Indigenous communities who call the untouched rainforest their home.

Now, Luke Taylor reports from Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, “with half a million people slogging through the rainforest on their way to the US each year, Darién’s Indigenous groups say their ecosystem and way of life are under threat”.

Nearly 500,000 people pass through the territory annually, worsening the area’s ecological conditions and making it unsafe for those who live there. “Human rights groups such as Médecins Sans Frontières and Amnesty International are sounding the alarm about the humanitarian crisis as dozens of poorly equipped, malnourished people succumb to the jungle’s natural perils each year, and armed bandits rob, exploit and sexually abuse many more.”

For more of the week’s best environmental pictures, catch up on the week in wildlife here