What started two years ago as a club for black and brown kayakers, has turned into a league of activists who want to do something rather than nothing about climate change.

Thirty-two kayakers buzzed a berthed oil tanker at the Chevron Oil Refinery on Sunday afternoon. As the fog lifted, a company security guard with a megaphone told the paddlers to back up beyond a 100-yard safety zone. Ten boaters got brave and darted closer, teasing authorities to escalate. In the end, the activists did not stop the oil tanker’s 2 p.m. departure. But they will try again.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.