Firefighter Will Vogl uses hair sheep to practice soil conservation and wildfire mitigation among clients around his El Paso County regenerative agriculture operation.

This story was originally published by Bolts Magazine and is republished here by permission.

Mike Pese visited the grave of his mother, Miliama Suli, in Anchorage on Sept. 13, as he has every week since she died in March. 

On previous visits, he’d shared with her his fears about the yearslong legal case hanging over his family: The Republican-led state attorney general’s office had moved to convict him and 10 relatives for illegally voting, threatening up to 10 years of prison time. 

The family lived together in the small harbor town of Whittier, Alaska. They all hail originally from the faraway U.S. territory of American Samoa, which they thought gave them the right to vote in their local elections, as is the case for people born in every other U.S. state and territory. But unbeknownst to them, and even to many Alaska officials, American Samoans are denied voting rights outside of American Samoa, since they are classified as U.S. nationals and not citizens. 

State officials accused them of intentionally voting as non-citizens, and filed the criminal charges that have consumed Pese’s family for nearly three years. 

But Sunday’s cemetery visit was a celebration. Pese brought balloons, flowers, and Samoan-style pork buns, plus his wife and kids, and they shared the good news with Suli: Late Friday, Alaska prosecutors, fresh off a loss at the state Court of Appeals, had decided to drop the voter fraud charges against this family.

“It’s a huge amount of weight lifted off my shoulders,” Pese told Bolts from the gravesite. “I’ve never been stressed out so badly.”

His mother, who had been among the 11 defendants in the case, died while under prosecution. On her death bed, Suli, matriarch of the robust American Samoan community in Whittier, told friends and family how worried she was about the case. “She would praise the Lord and she would throw a barbecue to celebrate this victory,” Pese said. “I know she’s really happy right now.”

Equally relieved was Pese’s wife, Tupe Smith, whose 2023 victory in a local school board election set off the chain of events that led to the prosecutions. When she heard the news last week, Smith said, “I cried and I thanked God. I don’t have to stress anymore. We have kids and we don’t have to worry about what’s going to happen to us.”

The prosecutions were a harsh civics lesson for American Samoans like Smith and Pese, who, as U.S. nationals, live in a sort of limbo status that confers various privileges, such as Social Security and a U.S. passport, but that also denies the right to vote in state or local elections—much less to seek elected office—if they ever move from American Samoa to another part of the country. For election purposes on any U.S. soil outside of American Samoa, they’re treated as though they are non-citizen immigrants.

The Whittier relatives are among thousands of American Samoan nationals living in Alaska. Like many in that community, they had been confused about their voting rights. Smith told the Alaska state troopers who arrested her in 2023 that she’d thought she could participate in local elections, but not in presidential elections. 

Even the cops who arrested Smith—and then returned months later to interrogate 10 of her relatives—were themselves confused about the law. “I thought people of American Samoa were U.S. citizens,” one trooper told Pese, Bolts found in a review of the interrogations.

These Americans were prosecuted for voting

That trooper shares this confusion with many Alaska state lawmakers, elections officials, and police. A yearlong Bolts investigation, published in partnership with High Country News, found that state officials generally had no clear understanding of the voting rights, and lack thereof, of American Samoan nationals, prior to the Whittier case, and that Alaska administrators have in fact proactively registered lots of ineligible voters, and even mailed them voter registration cards.

Nevertheless, the office of the Alaska attorney general, which serves under Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy, tagged the 11 Whittier defendants with felony charges carrying the potential of serious prison time.

This move horrified civil rights advocates in Alaska, who told Bolts they felt the prosecution was nothing more than a Trumpian bid to prove the existence of widespread voter fraud by non-citizens, which in fact is extraordinarily rare. The prosecutions also spooked many U.S. nationals outside of Whittier, some of whom have also voted, or at least registered to vote, thanks to Alaska’s longstanding failure to clear up the very confusion that had ensnared people in Whittier.

“There were questions across the whole state,” Tafilisaunoa Toleafoa, executive director of the nonprofit Pacific Community of Alaska, told Bolts on Sunday. “Whittier has a high number of American Samoans, yes, but so do Anchorage and Juneau and Utqiagvik and Fairbanks. Community members have reached out, concerned about the possibility of the same thing happening to them.”

Toleafoa added that while the dropped charges were a welcome step, they resolve neither the general confusion that led to the criminal case, nor the limbo state of U.S. nationals.

“I’d really love to see the American Samoan communities be given what they deserve. American Samoa is the United States and therefore birthright citizenship is a right for all American Samoans,” she said. “We’re going to take the win, but the work continues.”

Relief for the families in Whittier began earlier this month, when the Alaska Court of Appeals dismissed the indictment against Smith, on the grounds that Alaska state troopers had misled her in their original interrogation, and also that prosecutors had misled the grand jury when it secured an indictment against her. The court found that the state failed to prove that Smith had “purposely or deliberately” skirted the law, writing that it was not convinced of the state’s argument that Smith had acted with “consciousness of wrongdoing.”

This ruling applied only to Smith, but seemed to spell trouble for the state’s prosecution of the other Whittier defendants, whose situations were all similar to hers. In filing late last week to dismiss the charges against the rest of the Whittier defendants, the attorney general’s office called the move “a result of the decision by the Court of Appeals,” court documents show.

The office dismissed these charges “without prejudice,” meaning that they retain the option to file new charges against the family members in the future. Bolts asked the office whether it might still pursue charges, and got no response. 

But in a press release following the dismissal, the office reiterated that it still believes Smith lied and said it “respectfully disagrees” with the Court of Appeals finding that the grand jury was misled. “We stand behind the work of the Department of Public Safety and the dedicated troopers who investigated these cases,” Deputy Attorney General Angie Kemp said in the release.

The case might have been largely settled a long time ago, as Alaska prosecutors had offered plea deals to all the defendants but Smith last summer. But the family members unanimously rejected the offers, maintaining that they’d never intentionally broken any laws, and also because they did want to establish a precedent that could harm U.S. nationals in this or any other state.

Now, the Court of Appeals’ ruling in their case seems to raise the standard for future accusations of voter fraud in Alaska involving non-citizens who mistakenly vote; “knowingly” casting a vote, the court ruled, is not the same as “intentionally” violating election law.

As this case dragged on in recent years, it mounted an enormous emotional, mental, and financial cost to the family members.

“I’ve been punishing myself for this,” Nelson Vaimoa, one of the Whittier defendants, told Bolts on Sunday. “I’ve been going to work, trying to work three shifts to get my mind distracted from the case. I’d get home really tired; the case has been bothering me the whole time. Even when I had my daughter’s birthday, when she was 2 years old, it was bothering me. I was too distracted, and I forgot it was her birthday.”

Vaimoa and other defendants had been active members of the Whittier community, including by volunteering as first responders and organizing barbecues and other local events. Whittier is a town of about 300 people, where nearly every resident lives inside one enormous apartment tower. 

Vaimoa called the dropped charges “a big relief,” but added, “I don’t want to volunteer anymore. I don’t feel like helping out anymore. I just want to go to work and come back home. All of the savings I had were canceled, all the plans I had—all because of this case.”

None of these defendants was more of a Whittier pillar than Suli, a local religious and civic leader who owned the small grocery store at the ground floor of the apartment tower. The state continued to prosecute her even as her health declined ahead of her death in March.

Smith said of the state dropping the charges, “The first person that would’ve called my phone was her, calling me and telling me how good God is and telling her to come over to my house.”

Attorneys who represent the Whittier family members celebrated the state’s move, but noted the damage that has already been done.

“These are stand-up people, and to see them treated like criminals was just really disgusting,” said Neil Weare, co-founder of Right to Democracy, which advocates for territorial Americans. “It’s nice to see their good name and reputation getting cleared.”

“These are stand-up people, and to see them treated like criminals was just really disgusting.”

Weare also criticized the state for only dismissing the charges “without prejudice” and leaving the door open to future charges.

“Tupe and Michael deserve to know there won’t be another knock at the door, that this criminal targeting of the American Samoan community is really over,” he said. “An apology would be nice, too.”

Matt DiTullio, an Alaska public defender who worked on the case, added: “I’m relieved that the courts came to the sensible and correct conclusion as to what these statutes are intended to prohibit, and that the state of Alaska followed that to the only just resolution of these cases. It is unfortunate that the Pese family and their community had to endure the stress of facing felony charges for years.”

That stress caused many of the defendants to question their place in Whittier and in Alaska. The prosecution was so traumatizing, defendants told Bolts at various points, that they’ve been considering relocating in order to start afresh.

But, Mike Pese said from the picnic at his mother’s grave on Sunday, “She loved Whittier. She’d made it her home. In the last weeks of her life, we talked about it, and decided we’re going to stay in Whittier and fight for it.”

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

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This article is co-published with Public Domain.

On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order singling out the state of Alaska and its abundant stores of oil, gas and minerals. “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential” called for expanding oil and gas development across Alaska’s North Slope, including some of the largest tracts of public land in North America.

The administration wanted to reverse regulations and new protections put in place during the previous administration — “punitive restrictions,” according to Trump — and streamline the permitting and review process for new projects, particularly in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the National Petroleum Reserve (NPRA).

Now, according to two sources familiar with the process and documents reviewed by High Country News and Public Domain, Trump and his team are following through on their promise to fast-track drilling in the NPRA by allowing new winter exploration and drilling to move forward without any kind of environmental review. The Department of the Interior is set to publish a “categorical exclusion” to the National Environmental Policy Act that would make it easier for the oil and gas industry to conduct seismic surveys, obtain rights of way and drill new exploration wells in the NPRA, an area that has become increasingly attractive to industry.

Seismic surveys, which are done with massive vibroseis trucks that weigh over 15 tons, can scar tundra and disturb wildlife, including female polar bears that den along the coastal region of the North Slope in winter and whose numbers have declined over the last two decades. Drilling and related infrastructure are also highly intrusive and, according to recent U.S. Geological Survey studies, have altered caribou behavior and Arctic migration patterns. The impacts of oil and gas development have been further complicated by rapidly warming conditions in the region, particularly thawing permafrost, which must be taken into account when operating on the North Slope.

But the Trump administration is stripping away existing environmental protections for nearly all stages of development. According to the sources, the categorical exclusion — tentatively titled “NPR-A Wintertime Oil and Gas Exploration Operations” — could be released as early as this week in order to facilitate seismic surveys and drilling over the winter. It was drafted without any public comment period or input from those in the region directly affected.

In an emailed statement, an Interior spokesperson confirmed that the department is working on a categorical exclusion, based on findings from “dozens of environmental reviews,” to speed up permitting for winter activity, including seismic surveys and exploratory drilling. According to the department, “These efforts are about using decades of experience and analysis to create a more efficient, predictable, and effective process while upholding environmental standards.”

The legal basis for a categorical exclusion is that the proposed activities will have “no significant impact” on the environment. Such exclusions are typically applied in places where the agency has determined there is little risk to natural resources. Jeremy Lieb, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, an advocacy group that has sued to block development in the NPRA, said that exploratory drilling and seismic testing have had well-documented impacts and are precisely the kind of actions that should be scrutinized by the land-management agency. The new rules, along with other changes being made by the administration, will effectively rubber-stamp industry operations in a remote and highly sensitive ecosystem.

“Drilling and seismic exploration for oil and gas in the Arctic are large-scale, industrial activities that cause significant, lasting negative impacts to the environment and nearby communities,” Lieb said in a written statement. “The administration cannot rely on a categorical exclusion to hide these projects from the public and avoid evaluating their environmental impacts.”

The 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve — the largest chunk of land managed by the Interior Department — provides important habitat to dozens of migratory bird species, denning polar bears and three distinct caribou herds, two of which have dramatically declined over the last decade. Under President Biden, a significant portion of the reserve was set aside for conservation purposes; the Interior Department was in the process of creating a roughly 1 million-acre caribou conservation area requested by the Native Village of Nuiqsut, which sits just to the east of the reserve and relies on the Teshekpuk Caribou herd as a significant food source. The agreement, signed just before Biden left office, would have imposed additional restrictions on drilling activity in the herd’s prime calving area. 

Former Nuiqsut Mayor Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, who now heads up an environmental nonprofit, said the area around the village has been inundated with new drilling activity. She added that there’s evidence that the Teshekpuk herd’s migration patterns have already been impacted.

“All of the contractual agreements that were supposed to guide how development is going to occur have been ripped out of the books,” she said. “We feel that it doesn’t matter that we have a unique DNA, a small community of 500 people, that are just being totally disregarded and sacrificed for the greed of development.”

“All of the contractual agreements that were supposed to guide how development is going to occur have been ripped out of the books.”

Since Trump took office, Interior has scrapped the Biden-era regulations and canceled the caribou conservation initiative, instead prioritizing oil and gas development. Nuiqsut sued the department over its cancellation of the program and received a preliminary injunction in March. In May, after receiving a petition from the Alaska Oil and Gas Association (AOGA), a trade group that promotes drilling in the state and whose former CEO and president, Kara Moriarty, is now a senior advisor at Interior, the federal agency announced that it would begin “streamlining permitting for oil and gas infrastructure” in the NPRA. (Interior’s senior advisor for Alaska during Trump’s first term, Steve Wackowski, replaced Moriarty as head of AOGA.) 

This rule, effectively written by AOGA, would create a kind of blanket environmental impact statement that would apply to all oil and gas production sites in the NPRA, making it easier for industry to obtain approval for the construction of pipelines, gravel mines, access roads and related infrastructure. The new categorical exclusion appears to be focused on winter exploration activity — particularly seismic surveys — and follows recent guidance from the Council on Environmental Quality that underscored “the importance of CEs as a core feature of NEPA.”

The categorical exclusion is also being developed without any public input. Until recently, it was a legally required part of the process, but last April, the council relinquished its government-wide responsibility to oversee and implement NEPA, allowing federal agencies to forgo the 30-day public comment period.

Ted Boling, a partner at Ashurst Perkins Coie, who served as a member of the White House Council on Environmental Quality from 2000 to 2010 and during Trump’s first term, said this is largely uncharted territory for federal agencies. Given the size and complexity of the NPRA, he added, it could leave the forthcoming provision vulnerable to legal challenges.

“These (categorical exclusions) historically have been done if there’s a rulemaking procedure,” Boling said. “So, if they’re not going to get public comment on it, we’ll see how reliable it is.”

In a changing Arctic, how much noise is too much?

The elimination of standard environmental reviews for certain drilling-related activity comes as industry has acquired dozens of new leases in the NPRA — an area roughly the size of Indiana. During a lease sale held in March, nearly 200 parcels totaling more than 1.3 million acres were secured by oil and gas companies, including Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips and Shell. Much of the newly leased land is close to Conoco’s controversial Willow Project, which was approved during the Biden administration and includes infrastructure that will  facilitate future development. ExxonMobil’s new leases — just south of Teshekpuk Lake, the largest body of freshwater in Arctic Alaska — fall within the caribou conservation area.  

Matt Jackson, Alaska senior manager for The Wilderness Society, which is currently suing the Interior Department over its development plans in the NPRA, said that public lands in the Arctic are being “sacrificed for oil company profits.”

The NPRA was first set aside as a naval petroleum reserve in the early 1920s, but despite its name, it has seen remarkably little development over the years, with most oil and gas drilling on the North Slope occurring on state-owned land in and around Prudhoe Bay. In the last couple of decades, however, ConocoPhillips has gradually expanded its operations westward and into the reserve. A new discovery by wildcatter Bill Armstrong in 2013 renewed interest in the area, especially the formation in and around the Willow Project, spurring talk of a “North Slope renaissance.” In the recent NPRA lease sale, Armstrong’s company, North Slope Exploration LLC, acquired the highest number of tracts and will now seek to develop those leases, with minimal environmental oversight.

The proposed development poses increased risk to an already fragile and rapidly changing environment. The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet, which has led to widespread permafrost thaw, coastal erosion and unpredictable winter weather during which most of the drilling activity takes place.

This past January, after an unusually warm week, one of the drilling rigs deployed by ConocoPhillips — known as “the beast” because it is the largest rig on the North Slope — toppled over and caught fire as it was being moved along an ice road toward the Willow project.

Several employees were injured, and thousands of gallons of oil were spilled on the surrounding tundra. It took the operator four months to remove the rig and clean up the site.

Lieb, the attorney at Earthjustice, said the incident was a good reminder of the “scale of these projects and the kind of things that can go wrong.”

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Colorado tallied $18M in damage to public infrastructure alone from the two fires. Trump will make the final decision.

Coloradans will not need to meet mandatory cuts under the federal plan released Friday. It and other upstream states are focusing on conservation to help stabilize the overstressed river.

Case challenging Colorado’s largest utility’s condemnation powers could resolve conflict over 550 feet of right of way on an Eastern Plains farm

As drought shrinks the food supply and federal budget cuts shrink benefits, the Cortez community comes up with a local solution

The lawsuit comes nearly a year after five men and a teenager were killed at Prospect Ranch LLC, after being exposed to highly toxic sulfide gas

On a clear August morning in Hood River, Oregon, Lesley Tamura walked through her 42-acre pear orchard. The sounds of a Spanish-language radio station wafted through the leaves as workers raced up and down ladders, grabbing green Bartletts and tossing them into bags strapped to their chests. In the distance, the rising sun bathed Mount Hood in a pink glow.

Tamura is a fourth-generation pear grower. Her great-grandfather started working this land more than a century ago. The farm even remained in the family’s hands while they were incarcerated during World War II — a time when many other Japanese Americans lost everything.

Because of that, Tamura has always considered her family fortunate. But now, eight decades later, she’s wondering if their luck has run out.

“As much as we do this because we love it, it’s just getting harder and harder each year,” Tamura said. “I would love to survive doing this and doing it well, but I’m not sure that’s possible.”

“As much as we do this because we love it, it’s just getting harder and harder each year.”

Between low revenue, high production costs and a debilitating pest, Hood River’s pear growers lost an estimated $40 million to $45 million last year. In a plea for help, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a disaster designation that could open up low-cost loans and other financial relief. But even if that request is approved, it may not be enough.

“I think it’s safe to say that many pear producers will be either reducing pear acreage or, frankly, going bankrupt,” said Tim Delbridge, an agricultural economist with Oregon State University Extension Service.

EVERY SPRING, the Hood River Valley erupts in delicate white blossoms. Though pears are picky about their climate, they grow well here: Altogether, Oregon and Washington produce nearly 90% of the nation’s fresh pears.

But last year, something else covered the region’s trees as well: the pear psylla. This small pest, similar to an aphid, munches its way through pear trees, excreting a sticky substance called honeydew. If that honeydew is left on the pears, it causes a type of mold that’s edible but unsightly, and that makes the fruit unsellable.

The psylla population was unusually large in 2025. Scientists aren’t sure why; though climate change could be a factor, such psylla spikes have occurred only about once a decade, making them difficult to study.

“It’s really hard for us to tease apart all of these big ecological interactions and try and figure out exactly what’s happening,” said Ashley Thompson, a horticulturalist who studies the region’s pear crops. “We don’t have good answers, and that’s frustrating for us and for the farmers.”

Still, by regularly hosing down their trees — Tamura, for one, used roughly triple the amount of water she normally does in a season — Hood River’s pear farmers were able to remove the honeydew and salvage most of their fruit.

The harvest was massive, in fact, producing a surplus that, unfortunately, led to low prices. Compounding the issue was the closure of a cannery in Yakima, Washington, one of the region’s long-standing avenues for excess fruit.

The farmers accepted that 2025 wasn’t going to be a great year but thought they’d avoided disaster. So last August and September, they sent a year’s worth of work off in truckloads to nearby packing companies, which would store the fruit and release it to the market incrementally.

Then, in January, as the packers started opening boxes of stored pears, they discovered that not all the honeydew had been removed, and that many bins of fruit had developed mold and would have to be discarded.

That’s when alarm bells started ringing for Tamura, who also chairs the Columbia Gorge Fruit Growers. For each bin of pears that she grew, at a cost of roughly $300, the packinghouse would pay her somewhere between nothing at all and $150, on average. In some cases, she might even get billed to cover the packers’ costs.

“We paid to grow the pears, we paid to pick the pears, we paid to pack and store the pears,” Tamura said. “We’re going to pay for the cost to discard them as well.”

The loss was emotional, too: Tamura still remembers the sticky pear juice that covered the roads near the packing facility, as truck after truck of moldy fruit was carted away.

The federal government’s crop insurance is meant to protect farmers in such situations, but it’s usually available only to those who notify their insurers soon after the harvest. And this disaster didn’t unfold until months later. So Tamura and her colleagues asked Gov. Kotek for help.

The governor’s July letter to the USDA suggested a variety of measures, including loans and relief payments. When High Country News asked the agency when it planned to make a decision, a spokesperson said, “USDA has received Gov. Kotek’s letter and is actively working to gather the necessary data and information.”

PEAR PRODUCERS DON’T HAVE much to fall back on. As they like to say, “We’re price takers, not price makers,” meaning that the retailers determine what they’ll pay, and the farmers have no choice but to accept that price if they want to move their product.

Farmers don’t find out exactly how much they’ll get paid until almost a year after they harvest their fruit. Though partial distribution checks arrive starting in January, they only receive the full payment once the packers and retailers have subtracted their share. 

“We just get whatever’s left over,” Tamura said. “And for a very long time now, that amount is not even enough to cover our costs.”

In 2008, Oregon’s farmers received an average of $473 per ton for their pears, according to the USDA. Seventeen years later, in 2025, the amount was unchanged: $473 per ton.

Many blame retail consolidation for this stagnation: Just four companies capture an estimated two-thirds of America’s grocery dollars, giving them enormous power over how much farmers are paid.

Who controls food in the West?

But Delbridge, the economist, said research on that front is inconclusive. “It is intuitive that that level of market power at the retail level would have an impact, but it is tough to say that’s what’s driving lower prices,” he said.

What is clear, Delbridge said, is that pears are not the fruit of the moment. Since the 1980s, the country’s consumption of canned pears has decreased by about 70%. And the demand for fresh pears has remained sluggish even as the demand for other fruit, like fresh berries, has more than tripled.

One challenge with pears, Delbridge said, is that consumers don’t always know how to eat them. People often expect them to be ready straight from the store. But many pears must ripen on the counter for several days first.

Tamura agrees that consumer education is a hurdle. “People are so used to the immediate results of ordering things and getting same-day delivery,” she said. “We’ve lost a bit of our patience, and that works against us as pear growers.”

WHILE REVENUE HAS FLATLINED, pear producers’ expenses have surged. Since 2008, not only has the cost of labor gone up, but inflation has risen by 54%, making it more expensive to buy everything from fertilizer to fuel.

Mike McCarthy has been growing pears in Parkdale, just up the road from Tamura, for 47 years. He estimates that labor now accounts for 60% of his expenses. He said that many well-intentioned regulations, like the state’s recent laws on farmworker overtime and housing, have stretched him and other farmers beyond capacity.

Last season was the worst of McCarthy’s long career. To hang on for another year, he said that many of his fellow farmers have “borrowed to the hilt,” with some taking out mortgages on land that has long been paid off. Others have sold to larger operations, or simply given up.

“There’s a number of abandoned orchards around the county now, which is very unusual,” McCarthy said. “It seems like the number is growing all the time.”

And though McCarthy is near the end of his own career, he’s worried about the next generation of farmers. “That’s really where the rubber meets the road is with these younger people,” he said. “Many of them are just super depressed.”

Tamura is doing her best to remain hopeful. The current harvest looks smaller and much less affected by psylla than last year, two factors that should lead to better prices.

She’s keeping her fingers crossed for a good season — one in which she breaks even.

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

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