Not more than a decade ago, when Dyson bought his first boat, he could make $5800 a day trawling for shrimp in the channels close to his home but also far out in the rich vastness of the Gulf of Mexico.

One of his most recent catches in mid-July brought in a measly $200, to be shared between himself and the two men that work on his boat. Dyson has eight kids, while his employees also have families.

But the relentless search for shrimp isn’t just a simple standoff between Dyson and the water. It’s yet another warning sign of a creeping cultural and environmental shift with implications far outside the small town boundaries of Cameron and beyond the chipped red paint and rusted deck of Papa’s Shadow.

As climate change relentlessly fuels drought and extreme temperatures across the western United States, stagnated wages have created problems for overworked and understaffed wildland firefighters, such as homelessness, suicide, and cancer, according to a May 2021 study presented at the International Association of Wildland Fire 6th Annual Human Dimensions Conference.

A temporary two-year pay raise helped the service retain many of its firefighters, but that expires in September and will reduce wildland firefighters’ salaries by about $1,500 a month. Without it, most earn under $40,000 a year, which is below the living wage in every state in the country, according to an analysis using the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator.

Those low wages have historically led to an exodus of experienced personnel, while those who have stayed struggle to find affordable housing and suffer from financial stress and PTSD, according to various reports and studies.

When Walter Moorer looks down Chin Street in Africatown, he remembers the names, homes, businesses, moments and lives that have long since moved on from this historic community founded by formerly enslaved Africans in Alabama’s port city, Mobile.

As a young boy living through the end of the Jim Crow era, Moorer collected old red bricks from a nearby landfill, selling each for a penny. He and his friends traded their earnings for cookies and candy at the old Chin Street convenience store. Those bricks helped build one of the nicer houses on his block, which today is pockmarked with vacant lots, dilapidated homes and the environmental scars inflicted by relentless industrial activities.

“This was a beautiful place to live until the world came for us again,” Moorer, now 66, recalls. As he speaks, a train laden with highly toxic chemicals and coal trundles through the historic neighborhood on its way to the nearby port. It’s a reminder that Africatown remains a battleground where the legacy of slavery meets the reality of environmental racism and industrial expansion.

Maurice wakes up before 6 a.m. most mornings and doesn’t go to bed again until long after the sun sets.

“I can’t sleep past six,” he said. “My brain starts thinking about everything I want and have to do around the island.”

But in Hog Hammock, there’s plenty to stress about.

Homes and land have been sold in the past to settle property tax debt with the local county.

Those taxes have increased as a result of new islanders building more expensive homes. The tax shot up by as much as a thousand percent in a single year back in 2019, forcing some descendants to make tough choices about whether they can even afford to stay.

And some have chosen to sell up, strained by the hefty economic burden.

In parts of Oaklawn Memorial Cemetery, one of Mobile’s known Black burial sites, you can see glimpses of gray and moss-covered graves poking out of the long grass or behind fallen tree limbs. In other places, the barely visible dirt paths lead to beautifully cared-for plots with graves adorned in bright-colored flowers under the kind of dreamy and languid trees you might only find in the South.

Other paths, half-covered in weeds and grass, unspool into neglected tree lines and ground depressions where the graves of genuine Black heroes have been long consumed by nature.

“There are beautiful stories under all this,” said Ursel Forbes, observing the overgrown fields around her small family plot. She was checking it for flood damage with her brother John Forbes who was visiting from Texas. “What you can see is kept up by families and volunteers. So much of the rest is hidden or probably long gone.”