Now, more than a dozen Kiselyovsk residents, including Alexandrovna, are asking Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to accept them as environmental refugees, as CBC News first reported .

Nikitina Irina Alexandrovna is from the Siberian town of Kiselyovsk, where inky black snow, a toxic byproduct of coal mining, has rendered it a nightmare-scape. Industrial waste covers homes, schools, and vehicles in a shroud of contaminated dust. The miasma of pollution is so pervasive that locals find it coming out of their mouths.

Indigenous peoples and people of color are disproportionately affected by our global climate crisis. But in the mainstream green movement and in the media, they are often forgotten or excluded. This is ** Tipping Point **, a new VICE series that covers environmental justice stories about and, where possible, written by people in the communities experiencing the stark reality of our changing planet.

“In this moment in Russia, there is a region where a terrible ecological situation has developed,” said Alexandrovna in June in a YouTube video that conveyed their request. “Open-pit coal mining led to this ecological catastrophe [...] when the whole world talked about our black snow.”

The town’s conditions became national news in February when footage of darkened snowdrifts and dirty icicles spread on Russian television that described the scenes as “post-apocalyptic.” In July, Pussy Riot, the Russian feminist punk group, released a track called “Black Snow”. The acid rain hasn’t fucking stopped since last year / my eyes are being corroded, its bleak lyrics go, speaking to “intolerable living conditions” that member Nadya Tolokonnikova condemned in an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The YouTube video shows mostly women standing outdoors, taking turns to read harrowing testimonials from sheets of paper. Their voices are muffled by the wind and some have brought their children. At one point, Alexandrovna matter-of-factly compares Kiselyovsk to a gas chamber.

“We were gasping in the city from coal, exhausting our children almost all winter,” said resident Uliya Gennadievna Vitzenko in the video, which was posted by a Russian YouTube channel that documents life in Kiselyovsk.

Russia is among a lineup of countries where citizens are seeking legal protection from environmental ruin. But the legal frameworks that dictate who deserves protection, and from what, are woefully unprepared for these cataclysmic shifts.

The term “climate change refugee,” for example, does not formally exist under international law as Izzie Ramirez explained for VICE, and is now being challenged on a global stage. The United Nations (UN) 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees only defines “refugee” as someone who crosses an international border for “a well-founded fear of being persecuted because of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.”

The Kiselyovsk group, meanwhile, seems to straddle several definitions. Ecologically, coal mining has destroyed the town, but is not necessarily a symptom of climate change. Still, their circumstances exemplify the Gordian knot that is today’s climate crisis, and you can see how victims of fossil fuel corruption are kindred with those harmed by its environmental effects.