When I started reporting this story, I intended to ask several rural election officials about their work: how they got into it, the highs and lows, what they wish people knew about it. But all four officials I contacted refused to be interviewed or else ghosted me when it was time.

That doesn’t surprise Paul Manson, the research director at the Elections & Voting Information Center, a nonpartisan academic research organization. Manson has seen how contentious rural election administration has become in the face of increasingly deep partisan divides and persistent misinformation. “There is some super-intense pressure on folks right now,” he said. “I would suspect, at this time, many local election officials are shying away from more spotlights.” 

Rather than add to their stress, I decided to ask Manson my questions instead. Though he isn’t an election official himself, he has surveyed and interviewed hundreds of them. Below, Manson explains what makes American — and particularly rural — elections unique, why most election officials are women, and what he’s most concerned about come November.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

High Country News: How do American elections differ from the rest of the world’s? 

Manson: If you were a voter in Mexico or France, you’d have a national voter ID card, and things would be managed at that level. Instead, we do a classically American thing: We push that responsibility down to the lowest level.

Instead of having one federal office of elections, we have 8,000-10,000 of them. That number varies a bit, because we divide the duties of election administration — from voter registration to Election Day administration to auditing and certification (of votes) — differently in each state. So we even have a hard time defining what an election office is. It’s a beautiful bit of American democracy at work.

HCN: Are there any advantages of this system, especially when it comes to rural areas? 

Manson: Rural election officers often have legitimacy. They have shared with me just how much work they do to know their constituencies: They go to Elks meetings, veterans meetings, and share what this work of running an election looks like. 

That’s a huge asset. As maddening as it is to decentralize it, that local face, I think, just means a lot to voters. If someone starts asking questions about how things work, a lot of these administrators are happy to invite them to observe the process during election season, and that can make a big difference.

HCN: How does election administration in rural areas — like Garfield County, Montana, which has 888 registered voters — differ from election administration in, say, Los Angeles County, which has 4.3 million registered voters? 

Manson: In a larger office, the staff are entirely focused on election administration. In a more rural setting, it’s often in another type of office. So, here in Oregon, the county clerk will be serving in that role — and also managing property recordings, marriage licenses, maybe passport applications. Elections are part of the basket but not the entire basket. 

HCN: Seven of the eight states that allow 100% vote-by-mail elections are in the West: California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Washington. How does that affect our elections? 

Manson: Thankfully, we’ve been on the cutting edge when it comes to voting options. Usually, the benefit of vote-by-mail is it’s cheaper: When you do polling places, you need to ramp up a lot of poll workers. That’s also a recruitment challenge. It used to be easier to find temporary workers, but this political binary has scared away some folks. Think about the average poll worker: an older American who’s maybe not interested in being in the fray. Vote-by-mail helps alleviate some of those pieces. 

HCN: What else has changed for local election officials over the past decade? 

Manson: Prior to, say, 2016, this was work that didn’t get a lot of attention. (Now) there are new stresses hitting these local election officials. When we were doing our interviews, in one of five, we would have to pause because it became too emotional, and the person needed to reset. 

It’s not uncommon for me to hear stories about personal threats, being challenged at the grocery store or (being) uncomfortable leading with what their job is because they’re fearful of how these national narratives have colored perceptions of elections work. Unlike their peers in more urban settings, (rural) election officials are lower-paid officials who wear many hats, but are also members of the communities they serve — and these attacks hurt uniquely for them. 

HCN: Your research has found that 84% of local election officials are women, and nearly three-quarters are over the age of 50. Many people you interviewed had mothers who held the role before them. Why does that matter?

Manson: In our society, we ask women to raise children, take care of the older generation and take care of their own household. (Election) work traditionally has done very well to support a woman trying to balance those three careers. You add on top an onslaught of public records requests that take up time, being challenged in the shopping line, and we’re seeing more and more departures from the field. We are losing institutional knowledge, folks who’ve been doing this for a long time. It seems like this toxic environment is really a challenge.

HCN: What happens if a rural district can’t replace its election official? 

Manson: We haven’t crossed that bridge yet. The closest we’ve seen is some activist perspectives — some examples in Colorado, New Mexico and California, where the secretary of State had to right the ship because someone came in and felt like they could manipulate how elections are run.

HCN: What can be done to improve the situation? 

Manson: We need to have candidates express their support for the legitimacy and quality of elections administration. This is going to be a very polarizing presidential election. I know these officials will do their best, but it’s a lot of pressure. 

HCN: Why should people care about rural elections? 

Manson: Some of these rural counties may represent a deciding factor in a congressional race, so the quality of election administration will matter in terms of how much faith we have in the outcomes. 

At the local level, I always ask students how many governments there are in the United States. And 90,000 is the official number, if you go with the U.S. Census. Most of those are special districts: school districts, soil and water conservation districts, rural fire protection districts. Those are elections that these county officials are also administering, so keeping that system operating is critical for a lot of the public services in rural counties.

Susan Shain reports for High Country News through The New York Times’ Headway Initiative, which is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as fiscal sponsor. All editorial decisions are made independently. She was a member of the 2022-’23 New York Times Fellowship class and reports from Montana. @susan_shain

The post What being a rural election official is like appeared first on High Country News.

Patty Coen was able to finish her bachelor’s degree because she had an abortion. Ever since, the Southwest Colorado resident has been an advocate for abortion access and reproductive justice. 

She worked as a nurse at a reproductive-care agency in Durango for about seven years. When a campaign started to protect abortion rights by getting a state constitutional amendment on the ballot, she headed the petition drive in rural Montezuma County, where she lives.

She said her personal story and her experience working at Planned Parenthood 

compelled her to get involved. 

“I worked at Planned Parenthood when Texas shut down abortion as unnecessary healthcare during Covid,” Coen said. “So I saw the people with uteruses drive 12 hours, have their abortion, get right back in the car and drive back to Texas.” 

Coen said she wanted to make sure that voters in Montezuma County had a chance to help get the amendment on the November ballot. 

“I really wanted our county to be represented,” Coen said. 

Although rural voters as a group are more likely than voters in large cities to support conservative candidates, that doesn’t necessarily translate into anti-abortion preferences. A poll of rural voters in swing states to be released this month by the Rural Democracy Initiative found that three-quarters of respondents said women should be in charge of decisions about abortion. 

“I know we [people who support abortion rights] are here,” Coen said. “You see the loud people of hate, and it’s like, yeah, they’re loud and they make you think they’re a lot of ’em. But I mean, wow, we got a lot of signatures.”

Abortion is currently legal in Colorado at all stages of pregnancy. The proposed Initiative 89 seeks to amend the Colorado constitution so that the legality of abortion in the state can not change in the future. It also would allow for public health insurance funds to cover abortion, overturning a current constitutional amendment prohibiting state insurance and Medicaid from paying for abortion care. 

To get on the ballot in Colorado, initiative petitions that seek to make changes to the constitution need at least 124,238 signatures with signatures from at least two percent of the registered voters in each of the 35 Colorado state senate districts. 

Cobalt, a Colorado abortion advocacy nonprofit, helped organize the signature gathering for Initiative 89, along with a coalition of organizations under the name Coloradans for Protecting Reproductive Freedom.

According to Laura Chapin, communications consultant for Cobalt, the petition was turned in to the Colorado Secretary of State with 230,000 signatures on April 18th, a week earlier than the deadline of April 26th. On May 17th, 2024, the Proposed Initiative 89 qualified for the November ballot.

“​​Rural Colorado was pretty awesome because people are really motivated. If you come to them and say, ‘we want to put abortion rights in the Colorado constitution,’ you get a really strong response. We’ve been really pleased with the rural outreach and the rural response,” said Chapin.

Coen, who lives in Montezuma County, said that even within Colorado there is not enough access to abortion care in the more rural regions, like Southwest Colorado. When Coen worked there, the Durango Planned Parenthood offered surgical abortions, but now only offers medical abortions. 

The Cortez Planned Parenthood, in Montezuma County, also offers medical abortions, but for a large chunk of the region including Montrose and the San Juan Mountain towns, accessing abortion care means driving over the San Juan mountains to one of two Southwestern Planned Parenthoods, west to Salida, or north to Glenwood Springs, a trip of at least 2 hours and including several mountain passes depending on the direction. 

At the same time that the petition drive to get Initiative 89 on the ballot was underway, a petition for an opposing initiative was also underway in Colorado to ban abortion after conception. The initiative did not receive enough signatures to appear on the ballot.

Abortion-rights petitions to add abortion access to state constitutions as a 2024 ballot initiative are in progress or have already been successful in many states including Arizona, Nebraska, Missouri, Maryland, Florida, and others. However, most of these measures only protect abortion until viability, which is not the case in Colorado. Colorado allows for abortion throughout the pregnancy. 

Montezuma County and Southwest Colorado’s location in the Four Corners makes it the ideal destination for out-of-state abortion seekers from neighboring states with harsher abortion laws like Arizona and Utah, or further away in Texas and Oklahoma.

“We’ve got to be a refuge state for this. We’re surrounded by states that are 100% against abortion,” said Coen.

The post Rural Coloradans’ Show Strong Support for Abortion-Rights Constitutional Amendment appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

This school year, Montana, a state with fewer than 8,000 teachers, had 1,000 unfilled teaching positions. Meanwhile, Dutton-Brady Public Schools, a rural district about an hour from the Canadian border, easily filled its three vacancies.

Administrators credit a blue-hued room strewn with toys and highchairs: Little Diamondbacks Daycare, which is located inside the district’s K-12 school, steps from the cafeteria and the library. On a chilly Monday morning, children were trying on costumes, riding rocking horses and enjoying a rowdy game of musical chairs.

Eight-month-old Rowan watched the action from the arms of a staffer. Rowan’s mother, Jessica Toner, is a rookie teacher who heads the third-fourth grade classroom down the hall. Though Toner was offered four higher-paying positions in Great Falls, where she lives, she could neither find nor afford decent child care. “I called probably 15 different day cares,” she said, but they either didn’t have openings or were too expensive. “It was a nightmare.”

Toner hadn’t considered Dutton-Brady, which is a 32-minute drive from her house. But when she heard it had an opening — one that came with subsidized day care — she applied. “That’s what drew me,” she said. “And then I came to find that I love it out here.”

In-school day care can be found across the U.S., from Maine to Oklahoma and Colorado. It’s one way to tackle two crises: a shortage of qualified teachers and a shortage of quality child care. Recent data suggests that 79% of U.S. schools with teacher vacancies had difficulty filling them, while half of Americans live in “child care deserts” — communities that have at least three times as many children as licensed child-care slots. In many places, including Montana, both issues are more acute in rural areas. And of the 10 states with the highest rates of residents living in child-care deserts, seven are in the West.

Ask anyone involved with school-run day care, whether staff, clients or administrators, and they’ll probably say they’re delighted to have it. Experts, however, warn that it’s not a panacea. “All of this is well-intended,” said Chris Herbst, a professor who studies child care at Arizona State University. “But none of this is a sustainable, broad-based, fully funded solution to a long-standing problem.”

IN THE SPRING OF 2022, Dutton-Brady faced several teacher retirements. Superintendent Jeremy Locke knew it would be hard to replace them; it always was.

The Dutton-Brady School District is deeply rural, serving 131 students in a 625-square-mile region, an area larger than Grand Teton National Park. Its main school is in Dutton, and two others are located on colonies of Hutterites, an isolated Anabaptist religious sect. Dutton, which is the only town for miles, is home to two taverns, a water tower, a bank and a gas station that also sells fertilizer and livestock feed. There’s not a single stoplight.

Recruiting teachers has long been difficult; at times, the district has had to lure teachers from as far away as the Philippines. And veteran teachers rarely apply. Most recruits are like Toner: recent graduates who are just starting out, and perhaps starting families.

So, at a meeting that spring, Locke and the Board of Trustees seized upon the idea of opening a day care center to boost recruitment and retention. They scrambled to get the paperwork, financing and staffing in order before the 2022-’23 school year began. “We had to make it work,” Locke said. “Or else we knew that we were going to be dead in the water as far as staffing goes.”

Little Diamondbacks now serves 21 children, ranging from a few months to 5 years old. Dutton-Brady teachers pay up to $270 per child, per month for full-time, year-round care, a rate that is subsidized by state grants and by non-staffers who pay full tuition, up to $540 a month.

Staffing the facility has been a constant headache — it’s tough to find child-care workers anywhere, let alone in such a rural county — but Locke said it’s been worth it. “If we didn’t start this day care last year, we would not have filled our three openings,” he said. “We have no teacher shortages right now.”

In-school day cares exist elsewhere in rural Montana, too. Ekalaka, a town of 399 people on the eastern edge of the state, opened its center in August 2022. Browning, located on the Blackfeet Reservation in northwest Montana, started its facility in 1985; it was initially meant to serve teen mothers but now serves mostly staff members.

Browning’s superintendent, Corrina L. Guardipee-Hall (Blackfeet-Cree), used the day care when her children were small. “It really helped me be able to be a teacher and eventually administrator and now a superintendent,” she said. “It did help retain not only me as an employee, but also other people around the district.” It’s also a recruitment incentive: Guardipee-Hall noted that two new teacher assistants submitted day care applications for their children immediately after being hired.

“If we didn’t start this day care last year, we would not have filled our three openings.”

Montana’s school-based day care centers would seem an ideal way to attract and keep teachers. But Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University, said they don’t address the root causes of shortages: low wages and decreased public perceptions about the profession’s prestige. Plus, day care centers support teachers for only a short time during their career, if at all.

“There are a lot of initiatives to compensate teachers in ways other than actual wages,” Kraft said, referring to efforts to subsidize student loans, housing or child care. “All of those have potential, although I would argue that it may be more effective to simply take the cost of those programs and fold them into higher teacher pay.”

In that regard, Montana has a long way to go: Its starting teacher salaries rank 51st in the nation. When the Learning Policy Institute, a national nonprofit, adjusted for cost-of-living differences, it found that the average starting salary for a Montana teacher was only $36,480 — far behind neighboring Idaho ($44,150) and Wyoming ($51,530).

As for why school districts might provide housing or child care before increasing wages, Kraft explained they might be “hesitant to commit to permanent and substantial pay raises with some uncertainty about the fiscal climate.” Besides, he noted, compensation must be negotiated with teachers’ unions — “often a time-intensive and slow process” — whereas a district can unilaterally decide to open a day care.

Ultimately, Kraft said, solving the teacher shortage will require major policy changes, as well as “generational shifts in how we perceive the profession.”

IN RURAL AREAS, in-school day care centers aren’t merely useful to the school; they also serve the community. About half of Little Diamondbacks’ regular attendees are the children of non-staffers, some of whom drive from nearly 40 miles away. Ekalaka’s facility, which is also open to community members, is the only licensed one in the county.

In rural Colorado, the West Grand School District, between Steamboat Springs and Breckenridge, has had an early childhood center since 2018. West Grand opened its facility after several teachers quit because they couldn’t find child care, but administrators soon realized it would address a greater need: The town has just one other licensed day care, and it’s often full.

The school’s day care center now serves roughly 22 children, only seven of whom are the offspring of teachers. “We knew we needed to (open it),” said Superintendent Elizabeth Bauer. “Not just for our teachers, but for our community.”

Hannah Wynd, who works for the local health department, said she might have had to move if she hadn’t gotten a spot at West Grand. “I, quite frankly, would not have a job if it wasn’t open and it didn’t have room for my children,” she said. “It’s super important, what it’s provided for my family.”

Experts don’t dispute the critical role these facilities play in families’ lives. In-school day care centers have been “introduced or enacted by well-meaning people who are probably frustrated that nothing is happening federally and are taking it upon themselves to try to better their community,” said Herbst, the Arizona State University professor.

“I, quite frankly, would not have a job if it wasn’t open and it didn’t have room for my children.”

Yet ultimately, Herbst believes such changes are “piecemeal,” and that true change must happen on a national scale. He wants Congress to support child-care subsidies, like those that were initially included in President Biden’s Build Back Better plan.

In the meantime, rural administrators, teachers and parents plan to keep doing what they can to keep their jobs local, their schools open and their kids cared for. (That includes obtaining additional sources of funding for their day cares: Dutton-Brady’s largest grant recently ran out, and West Grand is seeking new community funding partners.)

They don’t have the luxury of waiting for policymakers to decide their fates.

Because here’s the picture Locke painted: If Dutton-Brady loses a single teacher, it may not be able to replace them. If the school loses a second teacher, and a third, it could end up being assimilated into a bigger district. And then the community hub, the heart of the tiny town of Dutton, would be gone.

“We don’t have an option to not figure it out, because when we don’t, everything dries up,” Locke said. “It’s really an existential threat.”

Susan Shain reports for High Country News through The New York Times’ Headway Initiative, which is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as fiscal sponsor. All editorial decisions are made independently. She was a member of the 2022-’23 New York Times Fellowship class and reports from Montana. @susan_shain

The post This Montana school solved its teacher shortage by opening a day care appeared first on High Country News.

Only the tips of his crampons and ice axes held the climber’s body close to the wall as he balanced more than 100 feet above the snow-covered ground. A kick from his left boot dislodged a chunk of ice, which crashed far below like a chandelier shattering into thousands of pieces. Then Lake City, Colorado, was quiet again.

Lake City is an old silver-mining town — population 432 — tucked in a valley in the San Juan Mountains. It’s a popular summer gateway to the high country, but the throngs of warm-weather tourists and vacation homeowners tend to vanish at the first hint of snow. Business windows display “Closed for the season” signs, while a small but hardened group of locals hunker down for the long winter.

But on many weekends this year, just around the corner from downtown, dozens of cars lined the entryway to Engineer Pass. There’s a new kind of visitor in Lake City, the kind that thrives on the same bitter cold that drives others out: ice climbers. Here at the Lake City Ice Park, glittering ice cascades from the surrounding cliff faces like the tentacles of giant blue-green jellyfish. Climbers scale the towering walls and then shuffle into a warming hut to soothe their frozen toes.

The niche sport has brought a welcome influx of cash and liveliness into the winter isolation of Hinsdale County. Restaurants and lodges cater to the ice climbers, altering their hours and menus to accommodate them. One even began offering ice climbing gear rentals.

“My goal is to fill every lodge in town and have the restaurants stay open all winter long,” said Ben Hake, Lake City’s Parks and Recreation director. Winter sales tax revenue has risen by nearly 40% since 2019. Hake’s goal is to eventually cover a mile of the canyon in ice, turning Lake City into a climber’s paradise.

But the demands of Colorado’s billion-dollar winter recreation industry can have unwelcome side effects. Recreation booms and increased visitation have reshaped the identities of small communities across the Western U.S. And once development starts, it can become difficult — sometimes impossible — to control.

“We push and push tourism, and at some point we have to look at how we’re going to manage it,” said Lily Virden. She grew up in Lake City, where she is now a public school teacher and the owner of a clothing and gift store called 38º North. “This is the first year that I think we’re like, ‘Whoa, are we ready for this?’”

SEEKING SHELTER FROM the falling snow on a Saturday in February, a group of climbers hunched over a jigsaw puzzle-covered coffee table at the San Juan Soda Company. Christian Hartman’s family has owned the summertime ice cream pitstop since 1988. In July, the line often snakes out the front door and across the street.

“My parents used to say that you could literally shoot a cannon down Main Street in the winter and not hurt anybody,” Hartman said. “It was that dead.”

Three years ago, for the first time, Hartman decided to stay open during the winter. On the shelves, mixed in with the souvenirs and gifts, customers can find a menagerie of ice tools, mountaineering boots, crampons, ropes and helmets. Summer sales still dwarf winter revenue, but the shop is starting to make a small profit during climbing season.

“My parents used to say that you could literally shoot a cannon down Main Street in the winter and not hurt anybody. It was that dead.”

Around the corner at the Lake City Brew Company, owner Justin Hill has redesigned his menu to appeal to hungry climbers. During the fleeting summer months, thousands of Texans, Oklahomans and Louisianians pass through Lake City, attracted by the vast network of off-road vehicle trails right outside town. Every seat in the brewery fills up, and guests overflow onto the patio. Now, Hill’s tables stay full in January and February.

“The park makes it more exciting to live here in the winter,” Hill said. “Without ice climbing, Lake City would be pretty desolate.”

The Lake City Ice Park was created by a motley crew of carpenters and raft guides who shared a passion for the sport. They began “farming,” or creating their own ice in the Lake City area in the late 1990s — a scheme fueled by a mischievous curiosity and thousands of feet of hose.

Two local climbers, Craig “Mad Dog” Blakemore and Mike Camp, later noticed that the town’s main water tank sat right above cliffs that could potentially hold ice. The pair asked the town manager if they could tap into Lake City’s water supply and pump water over the edge when the temperatures dropped. This became the first section of the ice park.

“She (thought) I was crazy as hell,” said Camp, who has been ice climbing for nearly 40 years. “I said, ‘Just give me a chance, and let’s see what happens.’ The next weekend we had a whole wall of ice.”

Today, the town of Lake City runs the ice park on a modest annual budget of $16,000. Over the last three seasons, Hake has added two new areas, the Beer Garden and Dynamite Shack. Many of the climbs are steep enough to turn the average person’s stomach, but access is surprisingly easy. Climbers can tiptoe across frozen Henson Creek and drop a rope for almost any route after a 10-minute trek to the top of the cliffs.

The climbers often say they heard about the park by word of mouth or stumbled on it by accident. Although finding a hot breakfast can be challenging, they think the long drive to Lake City is worth it, a way to avoid Colorado’s busier, more well-known ice walls.

“Lake City is super low-key, and we prefer that,” said Brad Priebe, a climber from Colorado Springs. “But it’s amazing to see the number of people out climbing ice.”

THIRTY MILES WEST of Lake City, ice climbing has already remade another small Western Slope town. In Ouray, the climbers can scale more than 150 named routes along the Uncompahgre River Gorge at what has become the world’s largest man-made ice-climbing park. During the winter of 2021-’22, the Ouray Ice Park pumped $18 million into Ouray County.

In small recreation-dependent mountain towns like Ouray and Lake City, there is a fine line between much-needed economic growth and development run rampant. While most residents welcome the ice climbers, others worry that the crowds that are likely to flock to a well-known park could spoil some of the magic that originally drew them to Lake City in the first place.

But Lake City’s size and remote location could slow down its transformation. Surrounded almost entirely by public land and with a less-than-square-mile footprint, the town has limited space to expand, and there are no satellite communities nearby to help siphon off the population growth.

“I would definitely like (the ice park) to keep growing,” Hartman said. “You can try and increase growth, but it’s hard to stop it. Sometimes it’d be nice if it were like a faucet that you could turn on to flow that you want, and then leave it there. But we don’t have that kind of control.”

“It’s not like a boom or bust, and we’re not sinking money we don’t have. (The town) is content to build it slow and build it well.”

For years, Lake City tried to promote other types of winter sports, advertising its groomed snowmobile trails and small ski hill. But in the era of climate change, snowfall varies from year to year. At the ice park, the town can turn on the tap and create winter recreation. The Parks and Recreation Department is already working to create more ice to ensure that anchors stay open and climbers don’t have to wait in line.

“We’re trying to put a stable foundation under our community,” said Hinsdale County Commissioner Kristine Borchers. “It’s not like a boom or bust, and we’re not sinking money we don’t have. (The town) is content to build it slow and build it well.”

Hartman, the soda shop owner, said he still thinks of Lake City as a “true mountain town.” It’s the only incorporated community in Hinsdale County, home to a single school and no chain restaurants. But he believes the changes are for the best. There are new faces in town. The climbers are quiet, and the recreation is human-powered: no wheels or motors, just muscle and movement.

During the peak summer season in June and July, Hartman’s customers often ask him: “What’s it like during the winter?” His answer is slowly changing.

Bella Biondini is the editor of the Gunnison Country Times and frequently covers water and public lands issues in western Colorado.

The post Can ice climbing bring life to an isolated Colorado town in the dead of winter? appeared first on High Country News.

On a Thursday morning in late March, a group of Wenatchi-P’squosa people and a few dozen supporters assembled amid patches of snow and mud atop Badger Mountain in southeastern Washington. The foggy sagebrush-dotted bluff is among dozens of locations that developers want to use for new renewable energy efforts in the state. 

The gathering – the first Indigenous-led demonstration against this proposed development – was intended to highlight threats to cultural resources including food and sacred sites on the mountain. Earlier this year, a ProPublica and HCN investigation found that the state’s process for assessing those resources, which relied on a developer-funded cultural resource survey, had been inadequate. A state archaeologist identified significant shortcomings in the report that was submitted to get the project approved, and the investigation documented bullying behavior by the companies involved.

The proposed solar project is currently in the hands of a governor-appointed group of state officials who will advise him on whether to permit the project. Organizers said they were concerned that the Energy Facility Siting Evaluation Council (EFSEC) will move the project forward, despite tribal objections. The Colville Tribes have to work with state agencies like EFSEC on consultation and land surveys as part of the permitting process. The tribal nation, along with other Indigenous nations, has formally issued objections but did not publicly support or organize the demonstration. Still, multiple tribal leaders, including council members, showed up and shared their thoughts.

“The Colville Tribe has opposed this project since we were notified,” said Business Councilmember Karen Condon, adding that it breaks her heart and that she personally is opposed. If the solar farm goes in, she said, it will destroy their traditional foods and medicine. “Once our areas are destroyed, our ground is destroyed. We’ll never get that back.”

She said the tribal nation should have a greater say over what happens to it. “This is still our land,” said Condon. “We’re sharing it with those that currently occupy the land, but it’s our land.”

“Once our areas are destroyed, our ground is destroyed. We’ll never get that back.”

“Our people have been coming here since time immemorial to gather our first foods, our medicines,” said organizer Darnell Sam, a former tribal business councilmember and current traditional territories coordinator for the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. That confederation includes Sam’s people, the Wenatchi-P’squosa. He added that you can’t walk far in any direction without running into a cultural site. “What happens when we come here, and we can’t gather the food? You’re breaking the law. Long before there was any other law, this was the law: that we have to honor the food.” The development would also impact the Moses Columbia and the federally unrecognized Wanapum people, and at least one of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation. The mountain, located near the town of Wenatchee in central Washington, is “a mother. It’s a grandmother. It’s part of our family,” said Sam.

Another attendee talked about protecting everything that lives on the land. “Our brothers and sisters, the deer, the bear, the elk,” said Sophie Nomee, chair of the Wenatchi Advisory Group to the Colville Tribal Business Council. “These are the things that we have to continue to protect.” She cares about the non-Native current owners of the land, too, she said. “We don’t want them to experience what our ancestors went through, when they had to migrate up to the Colville Reservation.” 

For one protester, Steven Wynecoop, it’s not just about sovereignty and culinary tradition. The solar development is a health issue. “We can’t keep living off the foods they give us,” said Wynecoop. U.S. government distribution of canned and processed foods on reservations, along with disparities in food access, has been linked to health issues in Native communities. Clarice Paul, a member of the Wanapum Band, said that her community also has cultural ties to the mountain, and that developments on these sacred lands “go against the grain of historical traumatic healing for our people.”

For some, the demonstration was so important that they pulled their kids out of school to be here. “This is my family’s land,” said Mari St. Pierre, who brought her three children from a couple-hours’ drive away to attend. “A year before my grandma passed, she took us up here to dig for roots.” St. Pierre said she wants her children to continue learning about their ancestral lands, a goal supported by their education at Paschal Sherman Indian School, a residential boarding school originally built by colonizers. The Colville Tribes purchased it in the 1970s to disseminate their own cultural teachings.

“This is my family’s land.”

One supporter, Sonya Schaller, called Badger Mountain a “rare botanical garden.” Attendees proposed other locations for solar arrays: on fallowed farmlands, corporate rooftops, over parking lots or on lands where a Washington State University mapping project has identified least-conflict zones for solar siting. 

EFSEC has recently hired a contract archaeological firm to redo technical work after the original developer-funded survey sparked numerous objections from tribes and state agencies. If EFSEC approves the project, the final authority to permit lies with Gov. Jay Inslee. In 2021, Inslee vetoed language in the Climate Commitment Act that would have protected the Indigenous right to free, prior and informed consent to any development proposed on Indigenous sacred lands. On Thursday, demonstrators complained that they felt unheard by the state in general, and particularly by EFSEC. “They’re not listening to tribes. They’re not listening to the public. And that’s a problem. I do look forward to the day that we set up a protest in Olympia,” said Condon. Organizers say that’s the plan.

On the same day as the demonstration, EFSEC had planned a visit to the other side of Badger Mountain to conduct technical work with an archaeologist from the Colville Tribes. But that visit was rescheduled: “They’re afraid of us,” shouted someone in the crowd, to a ripple of applause and war whoops.

“Public participation is an important part of the EFSEC review for all projects,” said EFSEC spokesman Karl Holappa in an emailed statement. “We encourage the public to get involved and weigh in through the public comment process.”

Sam said that organizers weren’t thinking about EFSEC when they planned the event, and he emphasized that they’re not just “a bunch of rowdy, wild Indians.”

“It’s been said, and we’re going to say it again: We’re not against green energy. It has its place, but it’s not here on this mountain,” said Sam. “Let it find its place. Let the governor hear that. Let everybody at EFSEC hear that.” 

B. ‘Toastie’ Oaster (they/them) is an award-winning journalist and a staff writer for High Country News writing from the Pacific Northwest. They’re a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Email them at b.toastie@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy. 
Follow @toastie@journa.host

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Though it’s often less visible and rarely discussed, rural homelessness is rising six times faster than homelessness overall. One person who’s been sounding the alarm for years is Julie Akins, a veteran journalist and former mayor of Ashland, Oregon, who now serves as senior housing director at AllCare Health.

Her latest report on rural homelessness, which came out last month, is based on hundreds of conversations throughout southern Oregon over a six-month period. At times, Akins has even embedded with the people she interviewed: sleeping in her car or a tent, enduring scabies and head lice. We called her up to ask what she’d learned — and what the lessons might be for the rest of the rural West.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

High Country News: In your latest report, you noted that people in rural areas often deal with lower pay and a more limited housing stock than those in urban areas. How else does rural homelessness differ?

Julie Akins: Urban homelessness looks like a bunch of tents in a centralized space, because people are trying to access transportation and services. In the rural West, services are spread out, and sometimes it can take people hours to walk from one part of their community to another.

In rural communities, you see people trying to tuck away in places where they can be unseen. I interviewed people living at rest stops. Families in their cars, driving all night with the heat on to keep their kids warm. Grandmothers and grandfathers, walking with walkers to rundown RVs where they don’t have hot water. A woman living under the crawl space of an Airbnb that she cleaned. People on Bureau of Land Management land, trying to hide out in a vehicle. It’s scattered and pervasive.

HCN: There are many stigmas surrounding homelessness: that everyone experiencing it is lazy or has issues with substance abuse or mental health. What did you find? 

JA: That was the main thing people asked me to do: They spoke to me in exchange for reporting that they are not a “bum,” a “drug addict” or mentally ill. Breaking through the concept that if you don’t have enough money, you’re somehow a failure and don’t deserve a hand up is really the hardest point to drive home, right? Because those stereotypes exist.

HCN: A “living wage” is the amount an individual needs to earn to cover their basic needs. In Oregon, it’s $24 an hour. Readers may be surprised to learn that 60% of the people you spoke to were employed. Can you break down the math of poverty? 

JA: Well, Taco Bell pays $15 an hour. You could work there full- time and have another part-time job and still not have a roof over your head.

I met this young man, very smart. Halfway through college, he started having seizures; he discovered he had epilepsy. So he had to quit school, he couldn’t drive anymore. (He and his mother) were living in an RV. He wound up working at Taco Bell, but he can only work a certain number of hours. Because if he gets over a threshold, then he no longer is qualified for Medicaid. And without Medicaid, he couldn’t afford his anti-seizure medicine. The way we have it set up, you kind of have to stay in poverty if you have an illness.

At what point do we accept that? That you can be a working person and still homeless? That you can be a retiree who worked your entire life — and now you’re unhoused because your wife died, and only one Social Security benefit is not enough? At what point can we say the American dream has become a nightmare?

At what point can we say the American dream has become a nightmare?

HCN: According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, “a chronically homeless person costs the taxpayer an average of $35,578 per year.” When that person is placed in supportive housing, those costs are cut nearly in half. Can you talk about the cost of homelessness?

JA: I’ll use Susan as an example. She’s 71 now. She had a blister on her calf; she couldn’t keep it clean and dry because she was spending an Oregon winter in her truck. So this wound got worse and worse, to the point where it was so badly infected it was filled with maggots. She wound up in the intensive care unit for, I believe, eight days. The expense of that is astronomical: $3,000 a day. I mean, you could have housed her for how long for that kind of money?

HCN: What has changed since your first reporting trip in 2016? 

JA: There seems to be a marked loss of hope. When I first went out, people seemed to believe it was a blip. There was some sort of optimism. Now they’re looking around and realizing it’s mathematically impossible to pull yourself out of homelessness without help. That’s very discouraging. People want to be independent, to be proud of themselves. They want a good job, a place to live; they want to progress in their life. And when you do everything you can and that still doesn’t happen, how can you avoid losing hope?

HCN: What are the solutions?  

JA: Homelessness is a housing problem. When you’re hungry, you don’t sit around and think: Hmm, what would be a cure for hunger? You’re like, I’m hungry, I’m going to eat something. I’m unhoused, I need a place to live — it’s really that direct.

Mountain towns are trying all sorts of solutions to the housing crisis

HCN: How has this reporting changed you? 

JA: I don’t think I can ever not be grateful that I can lock my door and get in my bed and pull the covers up and drift off to sleep. It’s such a small thing, but it’s also a huge thing.

Until you’re (sleeping in your car), you don’t understand how terrifying it is. Even in small towns, there’s a lot of commotion at night that you might not ever know about if you live in a house. There’s the terror of: What if I have to go to the bathroom? And then just the general sense of being so out of touch with what you think of as normal life.

Now, I am really aware of what being ostracized in society can do to you from a psychosocial perspective. It’s so traumatizing. And this is what it’s like for people (experiencing homelessness) day in and day out. That is a moral failing. And it’s not the moral failing of the people who are unhoused; it’s the moral failing of this country.

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Over the course of 17 days, the team killed 94 brown bears — including several year-old cubs, who stuck close to their mothers, and 11 newer cubs that were still nursing — five black bears and five wolves. That was nearly four times the number of animals the agency planned to cull. Fish and Game says this reduced the area’s bear population by 74%, though no baseline studies to determine their numbers were conducted in the area. 

The goal was to help the dwindling number of Mulchatna caribou by reducing the number of predators around their calving grounds. The herd’s population has plummeted, from 200,000 in 1997 to around 12,000 today. But the killings set off a political and scientific storm, with many biologists and advocates saying the operation called into question the core of the agency’s approach to managing wildlife, and may have even violated the state constitution.

The Board of Game, which has regulatory authority over wildlife, insisted that intensive control of predators in Wood-Tikchik was the best way to support the struggling herd. But the caribou, which provide essential food and cultural resources for many Alaska Native communities, are facing multiple threats: A slew of climate-related impacts have hampered their grazing, wildfires have burned the forage they rely on, warmer winters may have increased disease, and thawing permafrost has disrupted their migrations.

With conditions rapidly changing as the planet warms, wildlife managers nationwide are facing similar biodiversity crises. Rather than do the difficult work of mitigating rising temperatures, state agencies across the country are finding it easier to blame these declines on predation.

“We don’t want to talk about how the tundra is changing, because that’s something we can’t fix,” says Christi Heun, a former research biologist at Alaska Fish and Game.

“We don’t want to talk about how the tundra is changing, because that’s something we can’t fix.”

In Wyoming, where a deadly winter decimated pronghorn and mule deer, the state spent a record $4.2 million killing coyotes and other predators and is considering expanding bear and mountain lion hunts. Wildlife officials in Washington are contemplating killing sea lions and seals to save faltering salmon populations from extinction. In Minnesota, hunters are inaccurately blaming wolves for low deer numbers and calling for authorities to reduce their population. Culls like these are appealing because they are tangible actions — even when evidence suggests the true threat is much more complex. “You’re putting a Band-Aid on the wrong elbow,” says Heun, who now works for the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife. 

As the climate crisis intensifies, she and others say, wildlife management strategies need to shift too. “All we can do is just kind of cross our fingers and mitigate the best we can,” she adds. For people whose job is to control natural systems, “that’s a hard pill to swallow.” 

IN JANUARY 2022, a flurry of snow fell as the Alaska Board of Game gathered in Wasilla, far from where the Mulchatna caribou pawed through drifts, steam rising from their shaggy backs. Its seven members are appointed by the governor. Though they make important decisions like when hunting seasons open, how long they last, and how many animals hunters can take, they are not required to have a background in biology or natural resources. They also do not have to possess any expertise in the matters they decide. Board members, who did not respond to requests for comment, tend to reflect the politics of the administration in office; currently, under Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy, they are sport hunters, trappers, and guides. 

That day, the agenda included a proposal to expand a wolf control program from Wood-Tikchik onto the Togiak National Wildlife Refuge — though that would require federal approval from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; the government ultimately rejected the proposal.

The conversation began with two Fish and Game biologists summarizing their research for the board on the herd. Nick Demma explained that, like most ungulates, on average half of Mulchatna’s calves survive. In a study he conducted, many died within two weeks of birth; he mentioned as an aside that their primary predators are brown bears. “But I want to stress that this basic cause of death and mortality rate information is of little use,” he quickly added. Predator and prey dynamics are complex: The calves may have died anyway from injury or disease, and their removal may reduce competition for food and resources, improving the herd’s overall health. 

When Demma tried to analyze the existing wolf control program, he found he didn’t have the data he needed to see if removing the canines helped calves survive. In fact, from 2010 to 2021, when Fish and Game was actively shooting wolves, fewer caribou survived. So the researchers turned their attention to other challenges the herd might be facing. 

His colleague, Renae Sattler, explained that preliminary data from a three-year study suggested there could be a problem with forage quality or quantity, especially in the summer. This could lower pregnancy rates or increase disease and calf mortality. In the 1990s, the herd had swelled as part of a natural boom-and-bust cycle, leading to overgrazing. The slow-growing lichen the animals rely on takes 20 to 50 years to recover. Compounding that, climate change is altering the tundra ecosystem the animals rely upon. She also found that today, 37% of the sampled animals had, or were recently exposed to, brucellosis, which can cause abortions, stillbirths, and injuries. Biologists consider such high levels of disease an outbreak and cause for concern.

Sattler also noted that half of the animals that died in the study’s first year were killed by hunters taking them out of season — meaning the predators killing the most adult caribou were people. For all these reasons, the biologists suggested that the Board of Game reconsider the wolf control program.

Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang, who oversees the agency, immediately questioned their conclusions, and their recommendation. Killing predators, he said during the meeting, “seems like one of the only things that’s within our direct control.” In other words, it was better than doing nothing. 

Demma seemed taken aback, and chose his words carefully. “I guess what we are kind of trying to present there is just the information,” he told the board. “It’s — you know — wolves aren’t an important factor right now.” The meeting broke for lunch. When it resumed, the board unanimously voted to continue the wolf program through 2028, and, even more surprisingly, to add brown and black bears over a larger area. The public and Fish and Game biologists didn’t have the typical opportunity to comment on this expansion of predator control.

When he heard what happened, “I just was stunned. I was shocked,” says Joel Bennett, a lawyer and a former member of the Board of Game for 13 years. A hunter himself, Bennett served on the board under four governors and recalls his colleagues having a greater diversity of backgrounds and perspectives. Their votes were always split, even on less contentious issues. The unanimous vote “in itself indicates it’s a stacked deck,” he says. That’s a problem, because “the system only works fairly if there is true representation.”

In August, Bennett and the Alaska Wildlife Alliance filed a lawsuit claiming the agency approved the operation without the necessary “reasoned decision-making,” and without regard for the state’s due process requirements. Bennett also was troubled that the state has tried to keep information about the cull private, including where the bears were killed. He suspects that, to have slain so many animals in just 17 days, the flights might have veered beyond the targeted area. He also wonders if any animals were left wounded. “Why are they hiding so many of the details?” he asked. A public records request reveals that although the board expected the removal of fewer than 20 bears, almost five times that many were culled without any additional consideration. 

Alaska’s wildlife is officially a public resource. Provisions in the state constitution mandate game managers provide for “sustained yields,” including for big game animals like bears. That sometimes clashes with the Dunleavy administration’s focus on predator control. In 2020, for example, the board authorized a no-limit wolf trapping season on the Alexander Archipelago, a patchwork of remote islands in southeast Alaska. It resulted in the deaths of all but five of the genetically distinct canines. The Alaska Wildlife Alliance sued, a case Bennett is now arguing before the state Supreme Court. “That was a gross violation of ‘sustained yield’ in anyone’s definition,” he says, adding that even today, there is no limit on trapping wolves there.

“That was a gross violation of ‘sustained yield’ in anyone’s definition.”

Once, shooting bison from moving trains and leaving them to rot was widely accepted. Attitudes have evolved, as have understandings about predators’ importance — recent research suggests their stabilizing presence may play a crucial role in mitigating some of the effects of climate change. Other studies show predators may help prey adapt more quickly to shifting conditions. But Bennett worries that, just as Alaska’s wildlife faces new pressures in a warming world, management priorities are reverting to earlier stances on how to treat animals. “I’ve certainly done my time in the so-called ‘wolf wars,’” Bennett says, “but we’re entering a new era here with other predators.”

EVEN AS LEGAL CHALLENGES to the board’s decisions move forward, scientific debate over the effectiveness of predator control has flourished. Part of the problem is that game management decisions are rarely studied in the way scientists would design an experiment. “You’ve got a wild system, with free-ranging animals, and weather, and other factors that are constantly changing,” says Tom Paragi, a wildlife biologist for the state Department of Fish and Game. “It’s just not amenable to the classic research design.” Even getting baseline data can take years, and remote areas like Wood-Tikchik, which is accessible only by air or boat, are challenging and expensive places to work. 

Paragi has for more than a decade monitored the state’s intensive wildlife management programs and believes predator control can be effective. Looking at data collected since 2003, he notes that when Alaska culled wolves in four areas in a bid to bolster moose, caribou, and deer populations, their numbers increased. They also remained low in those areas where wolves were left alone. (His examination of this data has not yet been published or subject to peer review.) Elsewhere in the state, removing 96% of black bears in 2003 and 2004, reducing hunting, and killing wolves boosted the number of moose. Heavy snowfall during the next two winters killed many of the calves, and most of the bears returned within six years, but Paragi still considers the efforts a success. By 2009, the moose population had almost doubled.

He’s also not convinced that Demma and Sattler were right when they told board members that predation doesn’t appear to be the most pressing issue for the Mulchatna caribou. He says record salmon runs have likely brought more bears near the park and the calving grounds, and warmer temperatures have fostered the growth of vegetation that provides places to hide as they stalk caribou. As to the suggestion that the herd is suffering from inadequate food supplies, he notes that their birth rate has been high since 2009. That’s often a strong indicator of good nutrition. 

But Sattler says, “It isn’t that cut-and-dried.” A female caribou’s body condition, she explains, exists on a spectrum and affects her survival, the size and strength of any calves, and how long she can nurse or how quickly she gets pregnant again. “The impact of nutrition is wide-reaching and complex, and it isn’t captured in pregnancy rates alone.” Understanding how nutrition, brucellosis, and other factors are impacting the herd is complicated, she says.

“We can present the data, but what you do with the data is ultimately a political decision.”

There are a lot of interacting factors at play on the tundra — and among those trying to determine how best to help the herd. “Part of the frustration on all sides of this is that people have different value systems related to managing wild systems,” Paragi says. To him, last spring’s bear kill wasn’t truly a question of science. “We can present the data, but what you do with the data is ultimately a political decision,” he says. 

Sterling Miller, a retired Fish and Game research biologist and former president of the International Association for Bear Research and Management, acknowledges that crafting regulations is left to the politically appointed Board of Game. But Miller says the agency tends to dismiss criticism of its predator control, when there are valid scientific questions about its effectiveness. In 2022, Miller and his colleagues published an analysis, using Fish and Game harvest data, showing that 40 years of killing predators in an area of south-central Alaska didn’t result in more harvests of moose. “Fish and Game has never pointed out any factual or analytical errors in the analyses that I’ve been involved with,” he says. “Instead, they try to undercut our work by saying it’s based on values.”  

Miller also was involved in what remains one of the agency’s best examples of predator relocations. In 1979, he and another biologist moved 47 brown bears out of a region in south-central Alaska, which resulted in a “significant” increase in the survival of moose calves the next fall. But Miller says Fish and Game often misquotes that work. In reality, due to a lack of funding, Miller didn’t study the young animals long enough to see if they actually reached adulthood. Similarly, Fish and Game conducted an aerial survey this fall of the Mulchatna herd, finding more calves survived after the bear cullings. But Miller and other biologists say that’s not the best metric to measure the operation’s success: These calves may still perish during their first winter. 

The Alaska government is the only one in the world whose goal is to reduce the number of brown bears, Miller says, despite the absence of baseline studies on how many bears are in this part of the state. It irks him that the state continues to use his research as justification for allowing predator measures like bear baiting. In most parts of Alaska, Miller says, “the liberalization of bear hunting regulations has just been so extreme.”

“The liberalization of bear hunting regulations has just been so extreme.”

While last year’s bear killings were particularly egregious, similar cullings have gone largely unnoticed. State data shows over 1,000 wolves and 3,500 brown and black bears have been killed since 2008 alone. In 2016, for example, the federal government shared radio tag information with the state, which used it to kill wolves when they left the safety of the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve — destroying so many packs that it ended a 20-year study on predator-prey relationships. “There weren’t enough survivors to maintain a self-sustaining population,” recounted an investigation by the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. The nearby caribou herd still failed to recover. 

Multiple employees for Fish and Game, who didn’t want to be named amid fear of repercussions, told Grist that the agency was ignoring basic scientific principles, and that political appointees to the Board were not equipped to judge the effectiveness of these programs.

Even these criticisms of the agency’s science have been subject to politics: This summer, a committee of the American Society of Mammalogists drafted a resolution speaking out about Alaska’s predator control — only for it to be leaked to Fish and Game, which put up enough fuss that it was dropped. Link Olson, the curator of mammals at the University of Alaska Museum of the North, was one of many who supported the group taking a position on the issue. Olson says that even as someone who “actively collect[s] mammal specimens for science,” he is deeply concerned with Alaska’s approach to managing predators.

A month later, 34 retired wildlife managers and biologists wrote an open letter criticizing the bear cull and calling the agency’s management goals for the Mulchatna herd “unrealistic.” Meanwhile, neither Demma nor Sattler, the biologists who cautioned the board, are still studying the herd; Demma now works in a different area of the agency, and Sattler has left the state and taken a new job, for what she says are a variety of reasons.

EVERY FALL, millions of people follow a live-streamed view of the biggest bears in Katmai National Park, which sits southeast of Wood-Tikchik. The animals jockey for fish before their hibernation, in an annual bulking up that the National Park Service has turned into a playful competition, giving the bears nicknames like “Chunk,” and, for a particularly large behemoth, 747. 

Though marked on maps, animals like 747 don’t know where the comparative safety of the national park ends and where state management begins. This can mean the difference between life and death, as Alaska and federal agencies have taken very different approaches to predator control: The National Park Service generally prohibits it. This has sparked a years-long federalism battle. Back in 2015, for example, the Board of Game passed a rule allowing brown bear baiting in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, leading the Fish and Wildlife Service to ban it in 2016. The state sued, and in 2020 the Trump administration proposed forcing national wildlife refuges to adopt Alaska’s hunting regulations. Similarly, the National Park Service challenged whether it had to allow practices like using spotlights to blind and shoot hibernating bears in their dens in national park preserves. In 2022, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that federal agencies have ultimate authority over state laws in refuges; last year, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

How these agencies interact with local communities is markedly different, too. Both Alaska Fish and Game and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have regional advisory groups where residents can weigh in on game regulations, but Alissa Nadine Rogers, a resident of the Yukon- Kuskokwim Delta who sits on each, says that, unlike the federal government, it feels like “the state of Alaska does not recognize subsistence users as a priority.” On paper, the state prioritizes subsistence use, but under its constitution, Alaska can’t distinguish between residents, whereas the federal government can put the needs of local and traditional users first. This has frequently led to separate and overlapping state and federal regulations on public lands in Alaska. 

Many people in the region rely on wildlife for a substantial part of their diet. Since the area isn’t connected by roads, groceries must be barged or flown in, making them expensive — a gallon of milk can cost almost $20. In addition to being an important food source, caribou are a traditional part of her Yupik culture, Rogers explains, used for tools and regalia. It’s a real burden for local communities to be told they can’t hunt caribou, which has driven poaching. As state and federal regulations have increased restrictions on hunting, she says residents have difficulty obtaining enough protein to sustain themselves through the winter. “If people don’t understand how it is to live out here, what true perspective do they have?” she asks. “Subsistence users are the ones who bear the burden when it comes to management. And a lot of the time, folks aren’t feeling that their voices are being heard or adequately represented.”

Yet Rogers says state and federal systems can provide an important balance to each other, and she approves of Fish and Game’s predator control efforts. As the former director of natural resources for the Orutsararmiut Native Council, she helped the council write a resolution, later passed by the statewide Alaska Federation of Natives, supporting last spring’s bear and wolf cull. She thinks officials should focus more on climate change but believes culling remains a useful tool. “It gives a vital chance for the [caribou] population and immediately supports growth and recovery,” Rogers says. She also asked Fish and Game to institute a five-year moratorium on all hunting of the herd. “If we go any lower, then we’re pretty much gonna be facing extinction.”

Who gets to make choices about the state’s fish and wildlife resources is a point of increasing tension this year, as a lawsuit unfolds between the state and federal government over who should manage salmon fisheries on the Kuskokwim River, to the west of the Togiak refuge. All five of its salmon returns have faltered for over a decade — making game like caribou even more critical for local communities. (In sharp contrast, to the east of the river, Bristol Bay has seen record recent returns, showing how variable climate impacts can be.) The Alaska Native Federation and the federal government say fishing should be limited to subsistence users, while the state has opened fishing to all state residents.

To ensure Alaska Native communities have a voice in such critical decisions, the Federation called for tribally designated seats on the Board of Game this fall. “We need to have a balanced Board of Game that represents all Alaskans,” says former Governor Tony Knowles. He, too, recommends passing a law to designate seats on the board for different types of wildlife stakeholders, including Alaska Native and rural residents, conservationists, biologists, recreational users, and others. Knowles also proposes an inquiry into Fish and Game’s bear killings, including recommendations on how to better involve the public in these decisions. “We deserve to know how this all happened so it won’t happen again.”

It’s clear to many that business as usual isn’t working. “I have no idea how the state comes up with their management strategy,” says Brice Eningowuk, the tribal administrator for the council of the Traditional Village of Togiak, an Alaska Native village on the outskirts of the Togiak refuge. He says Fish and Game didn’t tell his community about the bear cull, and he expressed skepticism that primarily killing bears would work. “Bears will eat caribou, but that’s not their primary food source,” he says.

Part of the solution is setting more realistic wildlife goals, according to Pat Walsh, whose career as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist involved supervising the caribou program in the Togiak refuge. Recently retired, he says the current goal for the Mulchatna herd size was set 15 years ago, when the population was at 30,000, and is no longer realistic. Reducing that goal could allow targeted subsistence use — which might help ease some of the poaching. Though Fish and Game has killed wolves around the Mulchatna herd for 12 years, he points out the caribou population has steadily dropped. “We recommended the board reassess the ecological situation,” he says, and develop goals “based on the current conditions, not something that occurred in the past.” 

Today’s landscape already looks quite different. Alaska has warmed twice as quickly as the global average, faster than any other state. When Rogers was in high school, she tested the permafrost near her house as an experiment. As a freshman, she only had to jam the spade in the ground before she hit ice. By the time she was a senior, it thawed to a depth of 23 inches — and in one location, to 4 feet. Summers have been cold and wet, and winters have brought crippling ice storms, rather than snow. Berry seasons have failed, and the normally firm and springy tundra has “disintegrated into mush,” Rogers says.

Feeling the very ground change beneath her feet highlights how little sway she has over these shifts. “How are you gonna yell at the clouds? ‘Hey, quit raining. Hey, you, quit snowing’?” Rogers asked. “There’s no way you can change something that is completely out of your control. We can only adapt.”

Yet despite how quickly these ecosystems are shifting, the Department of Fish and Game has no climate scientists. In the meantime, the agency is authorized to continue killing bears on the Mulchatna calving grounds every year until 2028. (The board plans to hear an annual report on the state’s intensive management later this month.) As Walsh summarizes wryly, “It’s difficult to address habitat problems. It’s difficult to address disease problems. It’s easy to say, ‘Well, let’s go shoot.’”

“It’s difficult to address habitat problems. It’s difficult to address disease problems. It’s easy to say, ‘Well, let’s go shoot.’”

Management decisions can feel stark in the face of nature’s complexity. The tundra is quite literally made from relationships. The lichen the caribou feed on is a symbiotic partnership between two organisms. Fungus provides its intricately branching structure, absorbing water and minerals from the air, while algae produces its energy, bringing together sunlight and soil, inseparable from the habitat they form. These connections sustain the life that blooms and eats and dies under a curving sweep of sky. It’s a system, in the truest and most obvious sense — one that includes the humans deciding what a population can recover from, and what a society can tolerate. 

As another season of snow settles in, the caribou cross the landscape in great, meandering lines. There are thousands of years of migrations behind them and an uncertain future ahead. Like so much in nature, it’s hard to draw a clear threshold. “Everything is going to change,” Rogers says.

Lois Parshley is an award-winning independent investigative journalist. Follow more of her climate reporting @loisparshley on social media. 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.

On June 8, 2023, Lindsay Yeager of Cortez, Colorado, woke up to a barrage of text messages, asking if she had heard about the local birth center closing. Yeager immediately sprang into action. By that evening, protesters gathered across the street from the city’s hospital with placards and a purpose: keeping the birthing center open.

The strategy worked, at least for the time being. About 10 days later, on the eve of another planned protest, Southwest Health System, which operates Southwest Memorial Hospital in Cortez, announced in a press release that the birthing center would remain open “following stakeholder input over the past two weeks.”

Yeager posted in a Facebook group that evening: “Congratulations Montezuma County! We will not be protesting tonight…Our fight is not over. We’ll be taking a breath to regroup but the battle for stable, community-focused care in Montezuma County continues!”

Judging by national trends, Yeager is likely correct that the battle will continue. Across the U.S., under half of rural hospitals like Southwest Memorial provide maternal-care services, and the number is falling, as the Daily Yonder has reported. The cost of maternal services is the primary cause of closures, according to the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform.

In a press release announcing the closure of the birthing center, SW Health named several factors that have affected rural maternal care programs, including cuts in reimbursements, difficulty recruiting specialists, declining birth volume, and an aging population. The press release said these are general problems in rural areas but did not link them expressly to the decision to close the Cortez birthing center.

In December, Southwest Health CEO Joe Theine, said finances are difficult for the maternity program. He said the costs per discharge in labor and delivery have gone up from $3,000 in 2019 to $4,500 in 2022. According to data from the Colorado Department of Public Health, 206 babies were born in a hospital in Montezuma County in 2022. SW Health runs the only hospital in Montezuma County.

Nationwide, less than half of all rural hospitals like SW Health offer maternal services, and the number is dropping, the Daily Yonder has reported. So Cortez has bucked the trend, for now. But the hospital’s long-term ability to provide services like the birthing center depends on community support, said Joe Theine, SW Health CEO.

In meeting minutes from an emergency board meeting on June 15 that was called in response to the birthing center protest, it was stated that SW Health was losing over $1 million annually.

“Birth is not profitable, that is not where healthcare institutions make money,” Yeagers said.

Over 50% of Montezuma County’s hospital births in 2022 were covered by Medicaid.

Southwest Health System is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation and is managed by Community Hospital Consulting, which is owned by Community Hospital Corporation, based in Plano, Texas. CHC assumed management in 2018 when the hospital nearly went bankrupt. The CHC website describes SW Health System as a “turnaround story.”

In addition to the Southwest Health System board, the hospital’s building and facilities are governed by the Montezuma County Hospital District board.

Yeager said losing maternal care services can have a ripple effect in a rural area. “I knew that not having the birthing center was going to have this domino effect,” she said. “It was going to affect women’s health care in all facets. It wasn’t just going to be that you wouldn’t be able to deliver a baby there.”

According to a March of Dimes 2022 maternal care deserts report, women in rural areas are at higher risk for childbirth complications and rural hospitals report higher rates of hemorrhage and blood transfusions as compared to urban hospitals. Half the women in rural areas have to travel farther than 30 miles to reach an obstetrics hospital, according to the study.

Without the birthing center, Cortez would be in that group. The next closest birthing center is in Durango, 45 miles east. Durango’s hospital, Mercy Regional Medical Center, is a Catholic affiliate hospital and does not provide tubal ligation or any medical procedures that could be associated with abortion.

The Cortez birthing center also serves southeast Utah or northwest New Mexico.

The closest big cities are Albuquerque (a four-hour drive) and Salt Lake City (a 5.5-hour drive). Denver is about seven hours and many mountain passes away by road.

A Community-Led Effort

Southwest Health’s initial announcement said the birthing center closure was temporary, while the hospital worked “to develop a plan that would allow us to resume these services.” But Yeager said once she started researching, she found no cases of a birth center closing temporarily and successfully reopening.

So she decided to help Cortez (population 9,117) come together to urge the hospital to keep the birthing center open.

The initial protest consisted of community members holding signs with slogans such as “Our Community, Our Hospital” and “Care close to home, just not for mothers and babies” across the street from the hospital.

After that, Yeager and a group of organizers started releasing the names and email addresses of board members and decision-makers for the hospital, and the community began to send a stream of messages opposing the birthing center’s closure. Residents connected via a Facebook group titled “Keep Our Birthing Center & Women’s Services Open,” sharing resources and planning protests.

The group’s first request was for the hospital to hold a public meeting to hear community concerns. SW Health responded with an emergency board meeting on June 15, 2023.

“It was so powerful because it was such a united voice from the community…there was just no way to deny what the community wanted,” Yeager said. She said the birthing center issue drew the community together and attracted support across political boundaries.

Hospital CEO Theine said in December that it’s up to the community to continue to support the hospital and all its services. The hospital’s costs are fixed, while the revenue fluctuates based on the number of people coming in the door. If the hospital provides it, and the community comes, they can provide more services, said Theine, “We exist to serve the community.”

Looking for Alternatives

The lack of maternity services in rural areas has some people looking for alternatives. Elephant Circle is a Colorado-based non-profit dedicated to “birth justice,” a term that includes everything from reproductive health advocacy to finding creative solutions for rural maternal care.

“Birth started in communities. It was upheld by community midwives from the beginning of time,” said Heather Thompson, deputy director of Elephant Circle. “And then the medical industrial complex eliminated midwifery and moved birth from the community into these for-profit institutions. (SW Health is a nonprofit. Ed.) And now we’re seeing some of the outcomes, those systems were not built for Black or Indigenous people. Those systems were not built to thrive in poor monetary resource places.”

Thompson advocates a more community-centered approach to birth through birth centers and midwives, although one issue with this is insurance. Medicaid does not reimburse Certified Professional Midwives (CPM), which is the only midwife certification where practitioners are required to have experience birthing babies in an out-of-hospital setting. CPMs are often only treating women with the means to afford a midwife, due to lack of insurance reimbursement, “which is not actually the populations that we’re worried about,” said Thompson.

Yeager said she worries about transportation issues if there isn’t a birthing option in Montezuma County.

“Over the course of a pregnancy, a woman may have 15 prenatal appointments or more,” Yeager said. “So if there’s a higher risk and if you don’t have a car or you don’t have gas, how many of those appointments are you going to miss? And how much does missing each appointment raise your risk level of complication?”

For now, the birthing center in Cortez remains open.

Yeager said the work to keep the center open is worth it.

“Every baby that’s been born there, every mom that’s received care there, every woman that’s been able to get care there since the date of that potential closure was worth fighting for,” Yeager said.

The post Activists Win a Battle for Women’s Reproductive Healthcare in a Rural Colorado Town appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

A product of the New Deal, Kit Carson was founded in 1944 to bring electricity to rural northern New Mexico. Today, there are 832 rural distribution co-ops nationwide.

In general, rural co-ops rely more on coal and have moved more slowly toward decarbonization than large investor-owned utilities. But that’s changing, with Kit Carson leading the charge. Co-op members worried about climate change are leveraging the distinctly democratic governing structures of rural distribution co-ops to encourage decarbonization. Robin Lunt, chief commercial officer at Guzman Energy, Kit Carson’s current energy supplier, called co-ops “a great bellwether” for shifting public opinion.

“They’re much closer to their communities,” she said, “and to their customers, because their customers are their owners.”

But democracy is messy, and change can take years. Lunt praised Reyes’ patience and persistence at Kit Carson, while Reyes credits the committed, vocal co-op members who pushed it to be “good stewards … of the land and water.” Still, the job is far from done, as the co-op continues its struggle to phase out fossil fuels entirely.

REYES WAS RAISED IN TAOS, in a home powered by Kit Carson. He was with his mother one day when she paid her bill at the co-op office. A manager offered Reyes a job, which he took after graduating from New Mexico State in 1984 with a degree in electrical engineering. A decade later, he became CEO. 

The early 2000s found the co-op trying to expand its offerings in rural areas and launch internet services. Tri-State was also trying to grow, and, in 2006, it announced plans to build a large coal plant in Kansas. It also wanted Kit Carson to extend its contract until 2050, adding another decade. It was around this time, Reyes said, that some members started asking “some pretty tough questions,” wondering why the co-op wasn’t investing more in renewables and whether it should extend its Tri-State contract.

Bobby Ortega, a retired community banker who was elected to the board in 2005, said that some board members, himself included, were hesitant to move away from fossil fuels. “When I got on this board, I was more leaning towards coal,” he said. “We were all raised on that kind of mentality (about) how our energy would be derived.”

Kit Carson’s long struggle paved the way for other co-ops to leave Tri-State. “That (trend) literally wouldn’t have happened, because nobody else would have had the guts to do it.”

Most of the board members had open minds, though, Ortega said, and Kit Carson refused to consent to an extension of the contract. The co-op wanted to end its relationship with Tri-State. But legally, the contract was still in force, and Kit Carson needed to find another energy provider before it could leave Tri-State.

In the following years, the co-op convened a committee of its members to discuss increasing solar energy usage. Tri-State, however, had set a 5% cap on locally generated electricity. In 2012, a group of Taoseños who shared an interest in renewable energy formed a nonprofit, Renewable Taos, and set a goal of 100% renewable energy for the area — a goal that was blocked by the Tri-State cap.

Renewable Taos reached out to Reyes to discuss the issue. As a co-op, Kit Carson needed buy-in across its service area — Taos and the Taos and Picuris pueblos, along with parts of Colfax and Rio Arriba counties — in order to make large-scale changes. But the co-op’s membership was hardly a monolith. “You had the liberals,” Reyes recalled, and the Renewable Taos members worried about climate change. But there had been an influx of “very wealthy but very conservative folks” in the Angel Fire ski area, and some of them were actively skeptical of renewables. Other Kit Carson members, notably those without much disposable income, feared that renewables would increase their monthly expenses.

Renewable Taos began attending Kit Carson’s board meetings with a new goal in mind: moving the entire service area to 100% renewable energy if the Tri-State contract was broken. “We didn’t align at all,” Reyes recalled. The board thought Renewable Taos, some of whose members were well-to-do retired scientists, were “kind of telling us dummies what to do,” he said, with a chuckle.

But Reyes and the board found a way to address that tension. “At the end of our first meeting (with Renewable Taos), I suggested to the board, well, if these guys are really going to help us and be critical, let’s give ’em some homework,” he said. The board asked Renewable Taos to visit every municipality Kit Carson served to build support for a joint resolution declaring that all co-op members were committed to fighting climate change.

Jay Levine, one of the original Renewable Taos members, still wonders if that was an attempt to put them off politely. Even so, the group accepted Reyes’ challenge, visiting every municipality in Kit Carson’s service area and answering questions about renewables and energy costs. “We talked to a lot of folks, and I think everywhere we went, they signed on,” he said. The process was aided by the falling cost of solar energy, which began reaching price parity with coal in the mid-2010s.

By 2014, every community in Kit Carson’s service area had signed on to Renewable Taos’ clean energy resolution. Two years later, after the co-op board finally found an alternate energy supplier, it broke its Tri-State contract for $37 million. Thanks to increased control over its power sources, Kit Carson reached an important goal in 2022: Renewable energy now provides 100% of the year-round daytime electrical needs of its more than 30,000 members. 

Now, other co-ops, notably Delta-Montrose in western Colorado, are following Kit Carson’s lead and leaving Tri-State in the name of clean energy.

Levine, the Renewable Taos member, said that Kit Carson’s long struggle paved the way for other co-ops to leave Tri-State. “That (trend) literally wouldn’t have happened,” he said, “because nobody else would have had the guts to do it.”

THE CO-OP’S ACHIEVEMENT — hitting the 100% daytime clean energy milestone — is clearly significant, but it also needs to meet a New Mexico mandate that rural co-ops transition entirely to carbon-neutral electricity by 2050. One potential pathway involves a green hydrogen plant that the co-op has explored with the National Renewable Energy Lab, other government partners and the small village of Questa.

Conventional hydrogen production, which uses fossil fuels, contributes to climate change, but so-called green hydrogen can be produced by splitting water atoms with an electrolyzer powered by renewable energy. Proponents think widespread green hydrogen could reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 16% by mid-century. Despite all the investment and hype, however, few green hydrogen projects have broken ground. Still, Kit Carson has beaten the odds before; Reyes recalled that many people doubted that the co-op would ever reach its goal of meeting daytime energy needs with 100% renewables.

Kit Carson reached an important goal in 2022: Renewable energy now provides 100% of the year-round daytime electrical needs of its more than 30,000 members. 

The Questa plant would be built at a shuttered molybdenum mine, which operated from the 1920s until 2014 and was a major source of both jobs and pollution. In 2005, a Chevron subsidiary, Chevron Mining, acquired Unocal, the mine’s parent company. Today, Chevron manages the remediation of what is now a Superfund site.

At a series of local meetings, water was the top concern for Kit Carson members. A variety of sources could be used to power the proposed plant, including water that Chevron is already pulling from the underground mine, treating, and sending to the Red River as part of its Superfund mitigation. Reyes is optimistic about the hydrogen project, describing it as the next phase of Kit Carson’s clean energy journey. But he noted that the future of the project, and of the co-op as a whole, ultimately lies in the hands of the co-op’s members. “They have been part of that equation the whole time,” he said.   

Mary Catherine O’Connor is an award-winning reporter whose beats include climate change, energy, waste and recreation. Her work has appeared in Outside, The Guardian and NPR. She helps produce The Big Switch podcast.

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.

Tribal nations have a complicated relationship with the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Tribal governments have used the ESA on behalf of imperiled, culturally important species, litigating over dams that block salmon migration and securing funding to reintroduce protected species on their lands. But beyond Alaskan Native subsistence hunting rights, the law does not acknowledge tribal sovereignty. How, or even if, it affects treaty hunting rights and other aspects of sovereignty remains a disputed question.

The Endangered Species Act can be “both sword and shield for tribes,” said Monte Mills, director of the Native American Law Center at the University of Washington. “The limited way in which the ESA views wildlife resources, which I think is great in terms of protecting those threatened, endangered species, also doesn’t really account for …  tribal sovereignty.”

IN 1997, INTERIOR SECRETARY Bruce Babbitt and Commerce Secretary William Daley sought to remedy the law’s silence on tribal rights with an order acknowledging that tribal lands are not the same as federal lands. It directed federal agencies to defer to tribal management plans for plants and wildlife and to consult with tribal governments whenever a species found on tribal lands gained protected status. A spokesperson for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the agency now “routinely considers and uses tribal expertise and knowledge” in determining when to list a species and how to designate its critical habitat. (By law, federal agencies and federally funded activities must avoid “adverse modification” of critical habitat.)

In some cases, the federal government has chosen to exclude tribal lands when it designates critical habitat, citing possible negative impacts on tribal sovereignty or political relations. In 2011, the Fish and Wildlife Service did so when it identified critical habitat for the endangered arroyo toad, a bumpy, 2-inch-long Southern California amphibian with a melodious trill. Two years later, the agency made a similar decision concerning the southwestern willow flycatcher after a number of tribal nations objected to the inclusion of their lands. The Southern Ute Indian Tribe wrote that a critical habitat designation on tribal lands would require an “onerous, time-consuming bureaucratic process that infringes on tribal sovereignty and treaty rights and frustrates the ability of the Tribe to provide basic government services.”

“The limited way in which the ESA views wildlife resources, also doesn’t really account for…tribal sovereignty.”

The federal government doesn’t always make exceptions when conflicts occur. On the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in northeastern Utah, the law’s protections for two endemic cactus species clashed with the Ute Indian Tribe’s ability to develop its energy resources, its largest source of revenue.

Ataya Cesspooch, an enrolled citizen of the Fort Peck Sioux and Assiniboine Tribes and Northern Ute descendant, worked for the Ute Tribe and the Bureau of Indian Affairs as an environmental protection specialist when the tribe was developing its own management plan for the cactus in 2015. The Endangered Species Act doesn’t apply to listed plants on private lands, but it does apply to those on tribal lands when activities that need federal permitting, including oil and gas, are involved. Federal protections for the two species, she said, often fell into a “gray area” between recommendations and requirements, increasing the already lengthy federal approval process for oil and gas drilling on tribal lands. “Overall, the Fish and Wildlife Service did a really bad job of consulting with the tribe, of keeping them in the loop around a lot of this decision-making,” Cesspooch said. “That then led to a lot of antagonistic feelings.”

Cesspooch, now a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, plans to interview Ute tribal members about their perceptions of energy development on the reservation for her dissertation research. Compounding the frustration around the cactus is the tribe’s own history of land dispossession: The U.S. forcibly removed Ute bands from their homelands in Colorado in 1880, separating them from culturally significant plants and wildlife, which do not include the cactus. “It’s caused a lot of tribal members to say the U.S. government cares more about this cactus than it does about Ute people,” Cesspooch said. 

SOME OF THE TENSION around the Endangered Species Act concerns tribal nations’ right to fish, hunt and gather on their homelands, as recognized by treaties with the U.S. government and by the U.N. Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People. The Colville Tribes have reintroduced not only lynx but salmon, pronghorn, bison and bighorn sheep, hoping to establish healthy populations of these species and resume a hunting relationship with them, just as they have with gray wolves, says Chairman Erickson. Gray wolves remain federally protected in much of the U.S., but at least seven packs overlap with Colville lands, and the tribe has allowed its members to hunt since 2012. Earlier this year, the state of Colorado even approached the tribe about transplanting some wolves from the area for reintroduction, a possibility that remains under discussion.

“It’s caused a lot of tribal members to say the U.S. government cares more about this cactus than it does about Ute people.”

When it comes to restoring wildlife on tribal lands, Erickson explained, “it’s not just to get them on the landscape, which is important. We want to make sure they’re there for future generations, because we have a lot of cultural ties to all these species as well.” 

The impacts of off-reservation development and environmental degradation have forced some tribes to scale back subsistence activities. The Klamath Tribes in southwest Oregon once fished for c’waam and koptu, two species of suckerfish that live only in the Upper Klamath River Basin, but they stopped in 1986 because polluted waters and altered hydrology had caused both species’ rapid decline. Today, both species are listed as endangered, and there are only a few thousand koptu left. In Canada, West Moberly First Nations ceased hunting Klinse-Za caribou despite their importance to tribal lifeways; in 2013, there were just 38 caribou left. By 2022, after an Indigenous-led recovery effort, there were 114, a number that meets a recovery target set by the Canadian government under the Species at Risk Act, the ESA’s Canadian counterpart, but still falls well below a sustainable hunting population. 

Laws like the ESA and the Species at Risk Act “were designed to make sure species weren’t lost, but they were not designed to be able to cultivate abundance or sustain abundant populations. Their job is to make sure things don’t go to zero,” said Clayton Lamb, a wildlife biologist who co-wrote a paper with West Moberly Chief Roland Willson on the need to include tribal priorities in species recovery plans. Instead of aiming for the minimum number required for species survival, recovery goals could reflect the historic abundance — the number of caribou or salmon that would support regular hunting and fishing and the reconnection of culturally meaningful foodways.

As Erickson pointed out, many of the government actions and policies that initially reduced wildlife abundance also displaced and diminished tribal people and power. “A lot of the native species that have been extirpated are similar to us as tribes, Native Americans, and what they tried to do to us,” he said. The Endangered Species Act was passed to help recover imperiled species, but tribes want to do more than that: They want to restore their own relationship with those plants and animals. As Erickson put it, they want endangered species to “not just recover, but flourish.”   

This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, funded by the BAND Foundation.

Anna V. Smith is an associate editor of High Country News. She writes and edits stories on tribal sovereignty and environmental justice for the Indigenous Affairs desk from Colorado.

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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.