People visited Bureau of Land Management land more than 80 million times in 2022, hiking, biking, driving, exploring, hunting, fishing, climbing, camping and otherwise recreating. That’s a 40% increase over the past decade. In the same time period, the BLM’s recreation budget rose by only 22%.

The combination translates into a vexing problem for public-land managers in the West: Popular areas risk being loved to death. On the ground, this means more cars, trucks and ATVs barreling over sensitive species, and more garbage littering more trails through winter wildlife range and campsites. Meanwhile, the agency lacks the resources to keep up.

“In the past, we’ve had the luxury of being passive, because our lands haven’t faced that much pressure,” says Joel Webster, vice president of Western conservation for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. “But now, if we’re not proactive, it’s going to have some serious consequences.”

In an attempt to head off those consequences, the BLM recently released a 28-page document called the “Blueprint for 21st Century Outdoor Recreation.” In it, the agency takes on persistent issues linked to recreation’s increasing popularity, including harm to sacred tribal sites, chronic funding shortfalls and barriers to equal use, such as limited outreach and lack of diverse staffing.

The plan itself reads at a high level, addressing four broad goals: bringing in more money, building partnerships across public and private sectors, improving outreach and inclusion, and protecting the land while meeting the demands of increased recreation. The public has until Sept. 30 to give feedback to the agency.

The document is not a formal plan, but Webster said its recommendations could help relieve some concrete recreational pressures, beginning with the fact that only about 30% of BLM lands have a basic travel management plan. That means new roads and trails pop up across landscapes from sagebrush to slickrock, with little regard for an area’s wildlife and cultural sites.

As a first step, the agency should account for existing trails and roads, said Megan Lawson, an economist for Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit research firm based in Montana. The BLM has successfully identified most of its natural resource development opportunities. Doing the same for its trails would not only help protect important sites, but also help local communities manage and benefit from recreation.

The agency also needs to figure out just how many people are using various sites and find ways to prevent crowding and overuse at the most popular areas.

Take Moab, Utah. Visitation exploded there with hikers, bikers, climbers and campers drawn by its famous swooping sandstone, wavy dunes and towering crags. But Moab is also heralded as an example of how to respond, with hikers, bikers — both motorized and non — and other community members working with the BLM diligently, year after year, to build and maintain trails able to handle the ever-increasing crush of visitors. The coalition has also helped ease the burden on nearby national parks by redirecting thrill-seekers to other vast tracts of public land.

But it takes money, Lawson said, to track trail-users and post signs, build outhouses and educate visitors in multiple languages, and not all communities have the financial resources of an outdoor mecca like Moab.

And the BLM’s recreation budget is “trending in the wrong direction,” said Kevin Oliver, BLM’s division chief for recreation and visitor services. Ten years ago, the BLM spent about 84 cents on each visit. Today that number has fallen to 74 cents.

The agency is seeking fundraising help from the Foundation for America’s Public Lands, its congressionally authorized charitable partner, Oliver said. This could include individual donations and possibly corporate sponsors. It is also hoping for a financial boost from federal laws like the Great American Outdoors Act, which set aside billions of dollars for access to and infrastructure improvements on public lands.

BLM officials aren’t complaining about having more visitors; Oliver called the recreation spike “fantastic.” But they acknowledge that, as things stand, they simply cannot cope with the increasing demands. They know that the 40% visitation bump isn’t an aberration: Americans want to get outside.

The new document stresses the importance of states, tribes and local communities working with the BLM to come up with solutions. But the coalitions they create need to be durable, Oliver said, given inevitable changes in administrations and political priorities.

Webster agrees. While the growing numbers of visitors have already damaged some popular areas and put pressure on wildlife from elk to sage grouse, especially in states like Colorado, the bulk of BLM lands are not yet recreation destinations. But that can change quickly, and Webster wants the agency to plan ahead.

“It’s a lot harder to pull things back in if you’ve made a mistake than it is to do it right from the beginning,” Webster said. “And there’s just more people in the West, and more people recreating on our public lands.”

Christine Peterson lives in Laramie, Wyoming, and has covered science, the environment and outdoor recreation in Wyoming for more than a decade. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Outdoor Life and the Casper Star-Tribune, among others. 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.

TWIN FALLS, Idaho — When J.D. Davis, the department chair of English at Twin Falls High School, was told last year that half of the committee he was leading to pick new texts and materials for the district’s English Language Arts classrooms would be parents and community members, he objected.

“I said, ‘I’m not going to have parents involved! They don’t know what we’re doing. They don’t know what we need in a textbook as far as curriculum.’ I kind of scoffed at it,” said Davis, who also teaches journalism, oversees the school newspaper and advises the Gay-Straight Alliance.

A new Idaho law gave him no choice.

Across the U.S., educators typically lead textbook selections, although many districts, like Twin Falls, have long included parents in the process. Idaho’s “District Curricular Adoption Committees” law makes parent involvement mandatory — and then some — demanding districts form committees of at least 50 percent non-educators, including parents of current students, to review and recommend new texts and materials.

A year in, the law is reshaping what is or isn’t in the curriculum in many counties in this Western state, including how subjects like climate change or social movements are discussed in some courses.

It has spurred tough but positive parent-school discussions in Twin Falls where parents and educators say the conversations have forced them to consider one another’s concerns and perspectives. In other districts, however, it’s poised to harden divisions and keep students from getting learning tools they need.

Related: Inside Florida’s ‘underground lab’ for far-right policies

Around the country, curricula — books and materials that guide but don’t define lessons — have become a political target of conservatives who fear conflict with values they want to instill in their children. Over the past two years, 147 “parental rights” bills were introduced in state legislatures, according to a legal tracker by the education think tank FutureEd.

Only a handful passed. Many restrict discussions around race and gender. Several enforce parents’ ability to review texts and materials. A 2022 Georgia “Parents’ Bill of Rights” requires that schools provide parents access to classroom and assigned materials within three days of a request. The Idaho curriculum law, embraced by the state’s conservative legislature, went into effect in July 2022.

The curriculum law is noteworthy because it gives non-educators more power not just to inspect curriculum, but to help choose it.

Some educators view it as a political move to undercut their professional role. “The parent partnership is important,” said Peggy Hoy, an instructional coach in the Twin Falls district and the National Education Association director for Idaho. “The problem is when you make a rule like they did and there is this requirement, it feels as an educator that the underlying reason is to drive a wedge between the classroom and parents.”

Sally Toone, a recently retired state representative and veteran teacher who opposed the law, sees it as a legislative move by conservatives “to have parents be a driver, instead of a partner, in the educational process.”

Educators also voiced practical considerations. It can be tough for districts to find parents to devote time to curriculum review. Many have had to scramble, Hoy and others said. Only three non-educators agreed to serve on a math curriculum committee in Twin Falls, which meant that only three educators could participate — fewer than half the optimal number, said the educator who led the committee. Ditto for a science curriculum committee in Coeur D’Alene.

“My family and I are very religious. My biggest concern as a father was, ‘What are my children going to be reading?’ ”

Chris Reid, a father of seven who served on the committee to select a new English Language Arts curriculum for the Twin Falls School District

Having many non-educators involved also changes how materials are judged. Educators want to know, for example, if lessons are clear and organized, and whether they connect to prior learning and support students of differing levels. By contrast, “parents don’t understand the pedagogy of what happens in a curriculum,” said Hoy. They “look at the stories, the word problems, the way they are explaining it.”

Rep. Judy Boyle, a Republican state legislator who sponsored the law, initially agreed to an interview but did not respond to several requests to arrange it.

Related: Population booms overwhelm schools in the West: ‘Someone’s going to get left behind’

During the review process in Twin Falls, a district with 9,300 students in southern Idaho, parents objected to a theme around peaceful protests, the tone of questions around climate change and lessons that included social emotional learning.

The curriculum with social emotional learning “got nixed pretty quickly,” said Davis, the English teacher leading the committee. Social emotional learning (SEL) — tools and strategies that research shows can help students better grasp academic content — has become a new lightning rod for the far-right across and is often conflated with Critical Race Theory or CRT.

Chris Reid, a banker and vice mayor of Twin Falls and father with seven children in the public schools, said he was eager to help select the new English Language Arts curriculum and make sure materials were “age-appropriate” and not include “revisionist history,” LGBTQ themes or sexuality introduced “to younger-age children.”

“My family and I are very religious,” said Reid, sitting one afternoon in his mezzanine office at First Federal Bank. “My biggest concern as a father was, ‘What are my children going to be reading?’”

Despite some tense conversations, Davis, the teacher, said the process was overall “not threatening.” He also liked the curriculum choice, the myPerspectives textbooks by Savvas Learning Company. He does, however, see risks with the new mandate, including that a parent or community member with an agenda “could hamstring the district from getting the best textbook,” he said. “It could literally be one member of the committee.”

Committee member Anna Rill, a teacher at Canyon Ridge High School, said the difficult conversations about content “made us think a little more about the community you are living in and that you are serving.”

Twin Falls, named for the waterfalls formed by the Snake River Canyon dam, which in the early 1900s turned the area from desert into a rich agricultural region now called “The Magic Valley,” is politically conservative (70 percent voted for Donald Trump in 2020). L.H. Erickson, director of secondary programs for the school district, said he thought the curriculum “should meet the values and ideals of your community.”

Increasing public involvement makes good sense because schools must be responsive to parent views, said Erickson. “Parents give us their children for several hours a day and a lot of trust and we want to make sure to earn and keep that trust.”

Reid, the father of seven, liked being able to share his. “I got to hear other perspectives; they got to understand my side on the content,” he said. The experience led him to conclude that, “teachers are not evil. They are not trying to indoctrinate my child.”

Related: States were adding lessons about Native American history. Then came the anti-CRT movement

The new law may help to build bridges in Twin Falls and some other communities. But in West Bonner County, which serves about 1,000 students in rural north Idaho, a year-old dispute over an English Language Arts curriculum continues to fuel division.

The blow-up began last summer. In June, before the new law went into effect, the curriculum review committee, which included a few parents, chose the Wonders English Language Arts curriculum from McGraw-Hill. The school board approved it quickly and unanimously. The materials were purchased and delivered. “They were stacked in the hallways,” one parent said.

Then, some local conservative activists loudly objected, saying the materials contained social emotional learning components. In developing the curriculum, McGraw-Hill had partnered with Sesame Workshop to include SEL skills that language on the Wonders site said included “a focus on self-confidence, problem-solving, and pro-social behavior.” At a meeting on Aug. 24, 2022, the school board voted 3-1 to rescind the curriculum.

Because the existing curriculum is out of print, the district lacked a reading program last year.

“We had no spelling lists, no word work. The first unit was on the desert and we live in north Idaho,” said Whitney Urmann, who taught fourth grade last year at West Bonner County School District’s Priest Lake Elementary School. “Very early on, I stopped using the curriculum,” Urmann said.

She had two workbooks for her entire class and few books leveled to her students’ abilities. Other materials were incomplete or irrelevant, she said. From mid-October on, she said, she purchased materials herself, spending $2,000 of her $47,000 salary to be able to teach reading.

The board’s decision, said Margaret Hall, the board member who cast the dissenting vote, “has created some ill feelings.” Indeed: Two board members who voted to rescind the curriculum now face a recall after parents gathered enough signatures on petitions to force a vote.

Shouting at one school board meeting in June went on for nearly four hours.

The dispute, and the subsequent absence of teaching materials, has upset some local parents.

Hailey Scott, a mother of three, said she worries that her child entering first grade, an advanced reader, won’t “be challenged.” Meanwhile, her third grader is behind in reading, said Scott, “and I fear she will be set back even more by not having a state-approved curriculum in her classroom.”

Whitney Hutchins, who grew up in the district and works at the Priest Lake resort her family has owned and operated for generations, recently decided with her husband to move across the state line to Spokane, Washington.

“This is not the environment I want to raise my child in,” said Hutchins, mother of an 18-month-old. She said the curriculum law is part of a larger problem of extremists gaining control and destroying civic institutions.

“It is scary to me that 50 percent of people choosing the curriculum are not going to be teachers,” she said. “It is scary to me that it is going to be people with a political agenda who don’t believe in public education.”

Hutchins doesn’t see things improving. The school board, on a 3-2 vote, chose Branden Durst — who was previously a senior analyst at the far-right Idaho Freedom Foundation and has no educational experience — as the district’s new superintendent over Susie Luckey, the interim superintendent and a veteran educator in the district.

Durst said that he wanted the job because of the district’s challenges, including around curriculum. “I have a lot of ideas that are frankly unorthodox in education. I needed to prove to myself that those things are right,” he said. Those ideas could include using a curriculum developed by the conservative Christian Hillsdale College, he said.

Durst is currently assembling a new committee with plans to quickly adopt a new English Language Arts curriculum, but declined to share details.

“It is scary to me that 50 percent of people choosing the curriculum are not going to be teachers. It is scary to me that it is going to be people with a political agenda who don’t believe in public education.”

Whitney Hutchins, mother who recently decided to leave Twin Falls for Spokane, Washington

Jessica Rogers, who served on the committee that picked the Wonders curriculum, said she saw hints of trouble long before the vote to reject the curriculum. She said the curriculum adoption committee anticipated political attacks, including over images that showed racial diversity. “One of the things we did was go through the curriculum and see where the first blond-haired, blue-eyed boy was,” she recalled, adding that they noted pages to use as a defense.

It was, she said, “bizarre.”

Rogers and her husband recently built a home atop a hill with a broad view of Chase Lake. As her three daughters had a water fight on the patio, she hoped aloud that building in the West Bonner County School District was not a mistake.

This story about curriculum reviews was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Who picks school curriculum? Idaho law hands more power to parents appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

The latest movement, Greater Idaho, seeks to slice off almost everything east of the Cascade Mountains and add it to Idaho, uniting the right-leaning portions of the Beaver State with its more conservative neighbor. Nearly two dozen people conceived the idea over pizza and soft drinks in a La Pine, Oregon, restaurant in 2019.

Organizers frame Greater Idaho as a natural byproduct of Oregon’s “urban/rural divide” — shorthand for how populous cities can sway a state’s politics. The idea is far-fetched: In order for eastern Oregon to become Idaho, Oregon’s Democratic-dominated Legislature, Idaho’s Republican-dominated Legislature and the divided United States Congress would all have to agree. Still, the campaign has gained attention, garnering articles in national media outlets; in 2021, The Atlantic called it “Modern America’s Most Successful Secessionist Movement.”

But less attention has been paid to its underlying motives and how they fit into the Northwest’s long history of racially motivated secessionism. Over time, Greater Idaho has slowly revealed itself to be something of a poisoned apple: framed as a gift to discontented rural people, but actually a front for far-right culture war talking points, including racist ones.

The movement’s website and leaders echo Trumpian rhetoric about “illegals” and lambast Oregon for education programs about Black history and public health measures that prioritize communities of color. During the first year of COVID-19 restrictions, in 2020, Mike McCarter, a movement leader, told a regional website that Oregon “protects Antifa arsonists, not normal Oregonians.” He added, “It prioritizes one race above another for vaccines and program money and in the school curriculum, and it prioritizes Willamette Valley” — where Portland is located — “above rural Oregon.”

In 2021, Eric Ward, then-executive director of Western States Center, a Portland-based pro-democracy think tank, accused Greater Idaho of simply reviving what the Oregon Capital Insider described as a “white ethno-state dream.” The center’s advocacy arm later sponsored anti-Greater Idaho TV ads.

Over time, Greater Idaho has slowly revealed itself to be something of a poisoned apple: framed as a gift to discontented rural people, but actually a front for far-right culture war talking points, including racist ones.

McCarter pushed back: “Calling us racist seems to be an attempt to associate a legitimate, grass-roots movement of rural Oregonians with Hollywood’s stereotypes of low-class, ignorant, evil, ugly, dirty Southerners,” he said in a statement posted alongside photographs of Ward and Western States Center’s board — who are all Black — and the center’s staff. “(Ward’s) words mark anyone with a Greater Idaho sign or a Greater Idaho hat as targets for violent antifa members.”

Meanwhile, prominent racists were fired up about the idea. White nationalist leader Jared Taylor touted it on his podcast: “People who live out in the continents of rural sanity, they don’t want to be governed by the people who live on those islands of urban insanity,” he said. The audio was repurposed for a video on the far-right social network Gab — where former Fox News host Tucker Carlson is considered a trusted media source and no one would get banned for posting a swastika. Users buzzed about Greater Idaho.

Articles and clips on the anti-immigrant website VDARE also promoted it. One blog post said that Greater Idaho “would free eastern Oregonians from the anti-white, totalitarian leftists who rule the state.” A video warned that Oregon “won’t protect its residents from thugs, illegal aliens, communist rioters and other undesirables.”

Because Greater Idaho is unlikely to become a reality, “people dismiss it,” said Stephen Piggott, a program director with Western States Center. And that, he believes, is dangerous: “People are not connecting the dots,” he said. “The people who want to create a white homeland are backing it.”

WHEN OREGON WAS ADMITTED to the Union, its Constitution contained a clause banning Black people from moving there — the only state with such a provision. Even before its borders were drawn, people floated the idea of creating a slave-owning haven in what is now southern Oregon and Northern California, branding it the “Territory of Jackson,” after President Andrew Jackson. Confederate sympathizers considered several of the new state’s southernmost counties “the Dixie of Oregon.” Later, in the mid-20th century, the State of Jefferson movement emerged in the same area; it nixed owning slaves, but retained a slave owner as its namesake. Driven by people who felt they were over-taxed by Oregon and California, the movement still has supporters.

The secessionist torch passed from generation to generation. The phrasing changed, but the talking points remained the same.

In 1986, after migrating from California to North Idaho to build a racist refuge for his group the Aryan Nations, white supremacist Richard Butler hosted his annual Aryan World Congress — a national gathering of neo-Nazis, racist skinheads and members of the Ku Klux Klan. They agreed that, in the not-so-distant future, U.S. cities would become so overrun by minority groups that white people would be forced to flee to an “Aryan homeland” they envisioned in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

Butler died in 2004. Eventually, his compound was fully bulldozed and his acolytes scattered, but his ideas remained and evolved. In 2011, survivalist blogger and New York Times best-selling novelist James Wesley, Rawles floated an idea called “The American Redoubt.” (According to the Anti-Defamation League, some individuals add errant punctuation to their names to distinguish their first and middle names from their government-imposed or family names.) He encouraged Christians of any race who felt alienated by urban progressive politics to relocate to the Northwest, writing: “I’m inviting people with the same outlook to move to the Redoubt states.” Recently, the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a right-wing political think tank, echoed this. “Are you a refugee from California, or some other liberal playground?” it asked on its website, welcoming those newcomers as “true” Idahoans.

Starting in 2015, then-Washington state Rep. Matt Shea, R, pushed to sever his state at the Cascades, rebranding the rural eastern half as “The State of Liberty,” which advocated against same-sex marriage, marijuana and environmental regulations. Shea distributed a document calling for Old Testament biblical law to be enacted. On its website, Liberty State organizers suggest that if Liberty becomes a reality, they would be open to merging with Greater Idaho.

Within the last two years, Vincent James Foxx, a white nationalist associated with the Rise Above Movement — a group the Southern Poverty Law Center described as “an overtly racist, violent right-wing fight club”— relocated to Post Falls, Idaho. “A true, actual right-wing takeover is happening right now in the state of Idaho,” Foxx declared.

Greater Idaho is driven by ideas similar to those behind past movements: fleeing cities, lauding traditionalist Christian values, pushing a far-right political agenda. “Ultimately, I think in some ways, Butler’s vision is coming true,” said David Neiwert, an expert on far-right extremism and the author of The Age of Insurrection.

What all these secessionist ideas have in common, Neiwert said, is that they are anti-democracy. Greater Idaho’s organizers “don’t really want to put up with democracy,” he said. “They don’t want to deal with the fact that if you want to have your position win in the political arena, you have to convince a bunch of people. They just want to take their ball and create a new playground.”

Gary Raney, former sheriff of Idaho’s Ada County, where Boise is located, disliked seeing his state “being advertised as an extremist haven.” In response, last year he founded Defend and Protect Idaho, a political action committee that fights political extremism. “Everybody’s entitled to their opinion, and I welcome that discourse and discussion,” he said. “But when people are wanting to overthrow our government or our republic or our democracy … there’s nothing healthy about that.”

What all these secessionist ideas have in common, Neiwert said, is that they are anti-democracy. Greater Idaho’s organizers “don’t really want to put up with democracy,” he said.

In 2023, the Idaho House of Repre-sentatives passed a nonbinding proposal calling for formal talks with the Oregon Legislature about moving the border, though no such talks occurred. Raney sees Greater Idaho as “driving a wedge” in rural communities, using resentment over urban power to recruit people to more extreme causes. “The good people of Oregon who are doing this for the right reasons: Be realistic that it’s never going to happen, and be more influential in the Oregon Legislature,” Raney said. “For the extremists who are simply using this to divide and create their right-wing haven?

“Stay the hell out of Idaho,” he said. “Because we don’t want you.”

BY GREATER IDAHO spokesman Matt McCaw’s telling, the movement is born out of opposites that run as deep as the land itself. “The west side of the state is urban. It’s green, it’s very left-leaning,” he said in an interview with High Country News. “The east side of the state is conservative, it’s rural, it’s very dry. It’s a different climate.

“Give me a topic, and I can tell you that the people in Portland feel one way about it and vote one way, and the people in eastern Oregon or rural Oregon feel one way about it and vote differently,” he said. “Stereotype is a word that maybe gets a bad rap.”

To become Idahoans, McCaw explained, would mean “to have traditional values that focus on faith, freedom, individualism and tradition.” He pointed to Oregon’s liberal voting record on gun control, abortion and drug legalization. “Broadly, the people (in eastern Oregon) are very like-minded, just like broadly the people in the Portland metro area are very like-minded,” he said. “On these issues, Portland has a very distinctly different set of values than rural America.”

Speaking of differences, there are big ones between Idaho and Oregon. In rural Oregon counties, minimum wage is $12.50; in Idaho, it’s $7.25. Marijuana is legal in Oregon; in Idaho, possession can be punishable with jail time. In Idaho, abortion is essentially illegal; earlier this year, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek announced the state had acquired a three-year stockpile of mifepristone, a drug used for medical abortions. While there are no detailed plans on how Greater Idaho would bridge these gaps, McCaw said that “all of these things can be worked out.”

But is he upset by the white supremacist support for Greater Idaho? “I think that the extremist thing gets overblown,” he said. “In any group, there are going to be extremists that latch on, no matter if you want them or not.”

Nella Mae Parks, an eastern Oregonian, was raised in Union County, Oregon, and runs a farm there. She doesn’t recognize Greater Idaho’s portrayal of her home. “I think it’s a bought-and-paid-for narrative about what it means to be a rural American,” she said.

On the day Parks spoke to High Country News, she and a dozen other eastern Oregonians had just returned home after a 12-hour round-trip drive to Salem, Oregon’s capital, in an effort to get legislators to address nitrate water pollution. In 2022, commissioners in nearby Morrow County declared a state of emergency after high levels of nitrate — which is common in fertilizer and can cause cancer and respiratory issues  — were found in domestic wells.

Parks’ group came home unsure if they had accomplished anything. “The governor won’t meet with us on our issues, some of our own legislators don’t care about our issues,” Parks said. “I can understand why people feel left behind or left out, or in other ways sort of alienated from the more urban centers of power in Oregon. I think a lot of us feel that way, regardless of our politics.

“When we get blown off, that is widening this rural/urban divide,” she said.

But Parks’ solution is not to leave the state; it’s to fix it. And in May, it seemed like the effort had been worth it: Kotek told eastern Oregon leaders that she had asked the state for $6.2 million to address the nitrate issue. “It has taken a while to get here,” she admitted.

Gwen Trice, who grew up in eastern Oregon, is the executive director of the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center, a museum in Joseph dedicated to the multicultural histories of Oregon’s loggers. She won’t call Greater Idaho a movement, or even an idea. Instead, she calls it “a notion.”

“I can understand why people feel left behind or left out, or in other ways sort of alienated from the more urban centers of power in Oregon. I think a lot of us feel that way, regardless of our politics.”

Trice founded the museum when she realized that the stories of the region’s Black loggers — including her father — had never been told. The logging industry once thrived in Maxville, now a ghost town. The Bowman-Hicks Lumber Company recruited skilled loggers from the South, regardless of race, despite laws that had long excluded Black people from settling in Oregon. “We’ve worked hard to tell, honor and even embrace the messy part of our history,” she said, “and really tell a truthful story.”

Speaking as a historian, Trice said there’s no difference between Greater Idaho and the previous, more explicitly racist movements. “It’s repackaged,” she said. “I don’t think that anything is being hidden, and it’s appealing to a certain group of people only.

“It’s symbolic of dominant culture saying, ‘We know what’s better for you than you do.’”

Pauline Braymen, an 85-year-old retired rancher in Harney County, called Greater Idaho ideological, and impractical — a way of going back in time. “The urban/rural divide is an emotionally based state of mind that distorts reality,” she said. “The changes and steps forward in our quality of life in the 20th century, during my lifetime, were amazing. I just see all of that progress and vision being destroyed.

“If I wanted to live in Idaho,” she added, “I would move there.”

ON A MAP OF THE NORTHWEST, Washington and Oregon nestle together in semi-rectangular sameness. Divided in part by the Columbia River, Washington eases its southern border into the curve of Oregon’s north, like two spoons in a drawer. But next door, Idaho asserts itself like an index finger declaring “Aha!” or a handgun aimed at the sky for a warning shot.

McCaw, the Greater Idaho spokesman, often says that borders are imaginary lines: “a tool that we use to group similarly minded people, like-minded people, culturally similar people.”

“That whole statement is absolute nonsense,” said former Idaho State Historian Keith Petersen, who wrote a book about the borders in question, titled Inventing Idaho: The Gem State’s Eccentric Shape. The Idaho-Oregon border, he said, simply made the most geographical sense.

In 1857, two years before statehood, delegates from across Oregon Territory gathered to determine the new state’s edges. They decided that Oregon’s border should run from Hells Canyon south into the belly of the Snake and Owyhee rivers, then drop straight down to the 42nd Parallel. Only one delegate championed the Cascade Mountains as the new state’s easternmost edge, fearful that people too far from the capital wouldn’t be effectively represented.

“This grievance that ‘the population is over there, it’s so far to get there, we’ll never have power and influence,’” Petersen said, “hasn’t changed.”

Earlier this year, at a virtual town hall, two of eastern Oregon’s own instruments of power and influence in Salem — elected Republican lawmakers — grumbled that Greater Idaho was actually siphoning authority away from them, making it hard to effectively govern.

“The Greater Idaho people keep saying we need to do this,” said Oregon State Sen. Lynn Findley, who represents people from the Cascades to Idaho. Greater Idaho supporters have proposed ballot measures across Oregon that would force county officials to hold regular discussions about joining Idaho. None of the measures actually call for moving the border. And support hasn’t exactly been overwhelming; the most recent measure, in Wallowa County, passed by just seven votes. Still, by spring 2023, voters in 12 eastern Oregon counties had approved similar measures. “I’m no longer working on gun bills, abortion bills and other infrastructure bills,” Findley said. “It’s taken time away that I think would be better spent working on tax issues, and a whole plethora of other stuff.”

“We understand the intent and we understand the frustration,” agreed Rep. Mark Owens. “But I’m not going to apologize for having not given up on Oregon.”

But by May, it seemed Findley was, in a way, giving up. He was one of a dozen Republican senators and one Independent who walked out of the Statehouse for several weeks to protest bills on abortion access, gender-affirming care and raising the minimum age to purchase semi-automatic rifles.

In the midst of the walkout, just before Memorial Day, as the rhododendrons in Northeast Portland erupted in magenta blooms, McCaw, in a blue suit and crisp white shirt, sat in front of a live audience at the Alberta Rose Theatre. He was participating in a public discussion hosted by Oregon Humanities, which facilitates statewide conversations “across differences of background, experience and belief.” The event was ostensibly about borders, but by the end it was clear that it was really about Greater Idaho. McCaw repeated his talking points: Eastern Oregonians and western Oregonians are fundamentally different; borders create tension.

“We have a permanent political minority on the east side of the state,” he said.

Beside him were two other panelists, who shifted uncomfortably in their seats. One was Alexander Baretich, who designed the Cascadia flag: a blue-, white- and green-striped banner with a Douglas Fir at its center. The flag represents the larger Cascades and Columbia River Basin bioregion, “a living space — a life space,” he explained. “Once you get into that consciousness that you are interconnected with everything around you … those political borders dissolve.”

It’s the antithesis of Greater Idaho: Cascadia unites, Greater Idaho divides. “That flag is to create that consciousness that we are one with the planet,” Baretich said. McCaw furrowed his brow.

The moderator, Adam Davis, interjected: “I actually get viscerally uncomfortable … when I hear, ‘There’s people on the east side are one way, people on the west side are another way.’” Tension, he said, is difficult, but crucial. “That tension holds what our democracy, if it’s going to be an inclusive democracy, kind of requires.”

McCaw said eastern Oregonians, in 2020, didn’t feel like Oregon was being inclusive when it issued statewide indoor mask mandates. It “super-charged our movement,” he said. “The people on the east side of the state did not want those restrictions.”

“To form a movement because other people aren’t feeling like they have a voice in the state, while completely disregarding this reality and how effective it’s been towards Indigenous people? That is the gaslighting part.”

“I’m just going to straight-up disagree,” said the other panelist, Carina Miller, a member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and chair of the Columbia River Gorge Commission. Miller lives east of the Cascades on the Warm Springs Reservation, which McCaw told High Country News would be excluded from Greater Idaho, along with the city of Bend, because of their liberal politics.

Throughout the night, Miller repeated one phrase — “societal gaslighting.” She described growing up Indigenous in Oregon, where she received an education that normalized racist policies toward tribes, and where a boarding school built to assimilate Native youth still operates.

“To form a movement because other people aren’t feeling like they have a voice in the state, while completely disregarding this reality and how effective it’s been towards Indigenous people? That is the gaslighting part,” she said. Miller asked McCaw a question: “Do you really think that people who are advocating for Greater Idaho are the most disenfranchised people in these communities?”

People clapped before McCaw could respond.

“A strong majority of people in eastern Oregon do want this to move forward,” he said.

“But is the answer yes or no?” Miller pressed. “Are they the most disenfranchised?”

“I have no idea,” McCaw said.

Miller got the last word: She encouraged people to “hold onto each other and work it out.” The room erupted in applause.

McCaw didn’t join in. Instead, he sat perfectly still, his hands clasped tightly in his lap.   

Leah Sottile was a former correspondent for High Country News. She is a freelance journalist, the author of When the Moon Turns to Blood and the host of the podcasts Bundyville, Two Minutes Past Nine and Burn Wild. Subscribe to her newsletter The Truth Does Not Change According to Our Ability to Stomach It.

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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.

After months of planning, the cities founded the Selkirk Pend Oreille Transit (SPOT) system, bringing the first fare-free bus to the area. Anyone 13 and up can ride alone with routes that span the entire county. Many riders are teens and tourists who rely on SPOT buses to get up to the ski resort as […]

The post Rural Idaho County Thrives with Free Bus Service appeared first on Barn Raiser.

This story was originally published by the Rural Monitor.

As a librarian in Peck, Idaho — a self-described “one-woman show” in a community of just under 200 people — Doreen Schmidt’s workdays begin with an unusual routine.

First, Schmidt checks the air quality monitor installed on the side of the library building. Next, she chooses a flag that best matches the results: green for healthy, red for unhealthy, or yellow for in-between.

And at 10 a.m. every Tuesday and Thursday, when the Peck Community Library opens its doors, Schmidt hangs the flag outside, announcing the air quality of the day to students in the one-room schoolhouse across the street, post office-goers, and other community members passing by.

This routine is one of several initiatives that the Peck library and eight others in rural northern Idaho have adopted in partnership with the Nez Perce Tribe’s Air Quality Program in an effort to raise awareness of the health risks posed by wildfire smoke and steps that local residents can take to protect themselves against it.

“We librarians became informed [about air quality] so that we can inform our communities,” said Schmidt, who serves as branch manager of the Peck Community Library. “The partnerships and the connections we make through the libraries are really important, because the library is the hub of our community.”

Across the western U.S., wildfire smoke is increasingly recognized as an urgent public health issue for urban and rural dwellers alike. But rural communities face some unique challenges when it comes to collecting and spreading information about wildfire smoke and its health impacts — and, in response, uniquely rural solutions are emerging.

“Smoke has become more and more prevalent as a topic of concern in rural communities, but there’s still a lag” when it comes to making sure rural residents know how best to protect themselves against smoke exposure, said Savannah D’Evelyn, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Washington’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences. “We need to be thinking about smoke just as much as we’re thinking about fire.”

Rural Risks

Unhealthy air quality can affect any person who is exposed: immediate impacts of breathing in smoke may include coughing, difficulty breathing, headaches, irritated sinuses, and a fast heartbeat, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But some populations are especially at risk, including the elderly, children, pregnant women, and people with conditions including asthma, heart disease, and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), a rising cause of death in rural America. Wildfire smoke can also negatively impact mental health in rural communities, a study from University of Washington researchers found, with rural study participants reporting increased anxiety, depression, isolation, and a lack of motivation during smoke episodes.

As public health researchers learn more about the physical and mental health impacts of wildfire smoke, including in rural communities, a clearer picture of who is most at risk has started to develop, according to Elizabeth Walker, PhD, an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the University of Washington’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences and one of the authors of the mental health study. People who tend to be particularly vulnerable during smoke episodes include lower-income residents, those with outdoor occupations, and people experiencing housing insecurity or homelessness, said Walker, who is also the founder of Clean Air Methow, a nonprofit program that provides information and resources to help residents of Washington’s rural Okanogan County protect themselves against unhealthy air quality.

For these particularly at-risk groups, avoiding smoke exposure altogether is often not an option. Rural-based industries such as agriculture, forestry, and outdoor recreation often revolve around outdoor work, exposing employees to unhealthy air throughout the workday. And in small communities that lack indoor public gathering spaces with clean air, residents without housing — or who don’t have sufficient air filtration systems in their homes — may have nowhere to go to escape the smoke; in places that do have community spaces with clean air, it may not be practical or affordable for some residents to travel long distances from their homes to use them.

In some rural communities where wood-burning stoves are commonly used during colder months, smoke is inescapable even in winter: residents may experience exposure year-round, compounding the health impacts without seasonal relief.

“If people are getting a much higher exposure, either due to outdoor work or to their housing conditions, those folks really need to be targeted for providing whatever interventions we can,” Walker said.

Monitoring the Problem

For many rural communities, protecting against wildfire smoke exposure is made significantly more difficult by the fact that there is no way of knowing exactly how much smoke is in the air on any given day.

Information about air quality is often limited in rural areas, with air quality monitors more densely concentrated around larger population centers. The result is what D’Evelyn refers to as “monitoring deserts”: places where smoke is palpable in the air but where a lack or shortage of monitors leaves exact air quality levels unknown, making it more difficult for communities to gauge what sort of health protection measures are needed.

“We [air quality researchers] tend to focus on areas that are densely populated, because you already have air quality issues there from things like traffic and industry,” said Danilo Dragoni, PhD, Bureau Chief of the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection’s (NDEP) Air Quality Planning Bureau. “In rural communities where only indirect methods of measuring air quality are available, the understanding is that air quality is relatively good. But when you have wildfires and smoke, you go from a decent air quality to a very bad air quality in the range of a few days.”

In Nevada, smoke from a series of wildfires near the California-Nevada border in recent years served as a wake-up call of sorts for state officials, Dragoni said. During these episodes, the bureau received phone calls from emergency managers and school district officials in rural northern Nevada requesting air quality information, as information found online “didn’t really match what they were experiencing on the ground.”

“We realized that the coverage in terms of air quality monitoring was not enough,” Dragoni said. “Wildfire smoke is very unpredictable and can change very rapidly. So they started calling us to say, ‘Hey, can you give us more information?’ And we realized that we couldn’t really do it.”

To start to fill these gaps, NDEP purchased dozens of PurpleAir sensors — air quality sensors that are relatively inexpensive and easily installed, but less accurate than regulatory-grade monitors — to loan to rural communities across the state at no cost. The department has also partnered with the Desert Research Institute (DRI) — the nonprofit research arm of Nevada’s state higher education system — on a grant-funded project to improve and expand wildfire smoke air quality monitoring infrastructure and public information resources for rural communities statewide. The program, which began in 2021 and is ongoing, included the installation of roughly 60 smart technology air quality sensors as well as additional communication resources to identify gaps in public knowledge around the health risks of wildfire smoke in rural communities and develop new educational materials.

“Risk communication messaging around wildfire smoke is directly informed by air quality data,” said Kristin VanderMolen, PhD, an assistant research professor of atmospheric sciences at DRI. “And so for these counties where there isn’t quality data, messaging becomes difficult because, you know, what do you say?”

In Pershing County, Nevada — a county of roughly 6,500 people spanning more than 6,000 square miles — a lack of reliable air quality monitoring made measuring air quality difficult during wildfire season.

“Other than looking outside and seeing that your visibility was reduced, there was no quantitative method for determining how bad the smoke was,” said Sean Burke, Director of Emergency Management for Pershing County.

But the health impacts were evident, especially during the smokiest part of the season, Burke said: As an EMS worker, he saw a noticeable increase in asthma and COPD exacerbations when the smoke was thick.

Participating in the DRI-NDEP project has provided Pershing County with new tools to measure smoke particles in the air. Making sure that local residents understand the extent of the health risks involved — and how they can best protect themselves — can still be challenging, though, Burke said.

“I talked to one old fellow who said, ‘If I want to know how the smoke is, I’ll look out my window,’” Burke recalled. “I think, generally speaking, people get it: There’s smoke, and it’s not great. But I don’t think they understand necessarily just exactly how bad it can be, particularly if you’re in one of those sensitive health categories.”

‘Harnessing Toughness’

Smoke exposure levels tend to be higher in rural communities, according to D’Evelyn, in part because fires are often closer to home. The nearer and bigger the fire, the worse the smoke episode likely will be — but the more likely it is that air quality will be overshadowed by concerns about the fire itself.

“Fire is always the top concern because in rural communities, a fire can come right through and burn down your home,” D’Evelyn said. “And so this concept of being concerned about smoke exposure has been secondary on people’s minds — they’re much more worried about fire, which makes sense.”

A “long-term historical familiarity and cultural tolerance for smoke” in many rural communities in the West may also contribute to the perception that smoke isn’t an urgent public health issue, Walker said.

“When something is familiar to you, you tend to underestimate the risk that it poses,” she said. “The classic example is that people routinely think that being in a car is safer than being in an airplane. Smoke is woven into our experiences here, so it’s often not seen as something that can cause severe health risks.”

A public outreach campaign by Clean Air Methow over the past year has focused on changing these perceptions, using messaging that leans into what were identified through community focus groups and surveys as the “top three values” of the region: determination, grit, and family.

“Toughness is a strength to harness in rural communities, and we’ve tried to design the campaign around the idea that toughness means protecting and caring for other people and promoting awareness of who the most vulnerable groups are,” Walker said. “Maybe someone in your family or your neighbor falls into one of those vulnerable categories, even if you don’t, and they might need some help taking steps to protect their well-being and health.”

Within the Nevada communities participating in the DRI-NDEP project, “people are generally familiar with wildfire smoke risk exposure, and they’re generally familiar with who tends to be more vulnerable or at risk,” VanderMolen said. “But when it comes to mitigation strategies, there is a little bit of fine-tuning to be done.”

In rural northern Idaho, finding — and communicating — the most effective mitigation strategies has meant taking into consideration the unique needs of the region.

“Five or ten years ago, the messaging was just, ‘Stay indoors,’” said Mary Fauci, an Environmental Specialist with the Nez Perce Air Quality Program. “But many people up here don’t have air conditioning and have to keep the windows open to cool their house down at night, which brings in wildfire smoke. So the general acknowledgement was that we need to either change the messaging or provide means of help to get people to change so that they can be ready and resilient.”

Trusted Sources

In rural environments, information about smoke and its health impacts may be most effectively disseminated by sources close to home, research has found.

In a series of interviews and focus group discussions with residents of rural and tribal communities in north central Washington, D’Evelyn and other University of Washington researchers found that participants generally trusted local sources of information — such as tribal or local governments, or informal community communication networks — more than non-local sources, such as the state or federal government agencies. The research was conducted and published in collaboration with the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and the Okanogan River Airshed Partnership.

Interviewees also “overwhelmingly” described local and community channels — such as community information boards, local news, friends and family, and social media — as their main sources of information on air quality and smoke risk, according to the report.

Within any given community, “networks of communication are super varied,” D’Evelyn said. “There will be Facebook groups that 30% of the community is incredibly active in, and then there’s another percentage of the community that doesn’t even have internet access at their home and doesn’t want to. Making sure that you’re tapping all of the different communication networks that are necessary is really important.”

In Pershing County, a lack of real-time media coverage has made it difficult to keep community members informed about air quality and health risks in a timely way, Burke said. With the nearest television station in Reno, roughly 100 miles away, the local newspaper — which publishes once a week — is the primary source of local news.

“If you’re in a larger metropolitan area, you would expect to see something on the local news about hazardous levels of smoke, but we kind of fall outside of the major reporting area,” Burke said. “Our single largest challenge is getting the word out effectively.”

To do this, Pershing County and other rural communities have had to find alternative methods for communicating risk to the public. In Pershing County, those methods include posting information in public places — such as senior centers, community centers, and hospitals — and on social media, though spotty or nonexistent internet access in some rural areas can make the latter more difficult. In another Nevada county participating in the DRI-NDEP project, traveling U.S. Forest Service field technicians plan to deliver pamphlets with smoke information to particularly remote communities without reliable cell phone service or internet access.

To reach a diverse range of Okanogan County residents, Clean Air Methow has taken a diverse approach to its public messaging that includes billboards, print materials, radio spots, bar coasters, and social media posts. As part of a recent outreach campaign funded by the Washington State Department of Ecology, the organization and regional partners distributed more than 3,000 copies of a Smoke Ready Checklist, which lists instructions and best practices for minimizing smoke exposure — including setting up a do-it-yourself air cleaning system at home, making a plan for vulnerable household members, gathering N95 masks, and ideas for staying “mentally strong and engaged” throughout wildfire season — in both English and Spanish.

With funding from an Environmental Protection Agency grant, Clean Air Methow also made box fan air filters available for free to community members, with more than a dozen pop-up displays with information about how to get one set up at health clinics and social service organizations throughout the county.

Partnerships with “trusted partners” in the community, such as healthcare and social service providers and fire safety entities, have been key to Clean Air Methow’s success in distributing information about smoke exposure and protection strategies, according to Walker.

“Everything we have ever accomplished has only been on the basis of those strong partner networks and relationships,” she said.

A Community Effort

In northern Idaho, the Nez Perce Air Quality Program has found a different kind of trusted partner in the region’s community libraries.

The program began by approaching a handful of libraries in 2012, to ask whether one of the program’s interns could host presentations on air quality safety as part of the libraries’ summer reading programs. From there, the relationships grew, with more libraries signing on to host summer reading presentations on air quality and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects.

“Libraries have a lot more than books, and I think communities and the public are starting to realize that there’s other things they can do,” said Johna Boulafentis, an Environmental Specialist with the Nez Perce ERWM Air Quality Program. “Following through, showing up, and having our intern be there started to really build that trust.”

The Nez Perce Tribe has had a robust air monitoring system in place on its reservation since the early 2000s. But some of the area’s smallest communities, including Peck, were without their own air monitors — leaving mini monitoring deserts in a landscape where air quality can change abruptly from town to town.

When the Air Quality Program approached Schmidt in 2021 to ask whether the Peck Community Library would be interested in installing a PurpleAir Monitor and putting out a flag each day to help inform community members about air quality, Schmidt says she was “thrilled.”

Students at Peck Elementary School across the street — a one-room schoolhouse with 34 students ranging from kindergarten through sixth grade — have also embraced the program enthusiastically, using the flag to determine whether it’s safe to play outside for recess during fire season. At noon, when the students come over to the library for programming, they check on the PurpleAir sensor and help Schmidt to update the flag if needed. And “at the end of the day, after school, they’ll run across the street to see if they can check on it again,” Schmidt said with a laugh.

The Nez Perce Air Quality Program has expanded its partnership with participating libraries to include other community outreach efforts in addition to the flag program, such as hosting “Build Your Own Sensor” workshops for local junior high school students and demonstrations for the public on how to build an air filter out of a box fan. Box fan air filters are displayed inside the library entrances as well, with librarians available to answer questions about air quality.

Libraries aren’t the only community partners that the Nez Perce Air Quality Program relies on to help spread public awareness. The program has worked with health agencies, school districts, tribal housing entities, and others to share air quality information and teach strategies for minimizing smoke exposure and has distributed educational materials throughout the community in both English and the Nez Perce language.

But the multigenerational scope of community libraries gives them a unique ability to reach people of all ages and walks of life, Schmidt said.

“If you ever want adults to pay attention, you teach the kids,” Schmidt said. “They bring it home and they really want to make sure that their parents or grandparents, or whoever their caregiver is, are understanding what they’re learning.”

While the impact of the program is difficult to measure in numbers one year in, there is anecdotal evidence that adults are paying attention as well. Several older men living in Peck have asked Schmidt to help them install air quality apps on their cell phones after seeing the colorful flags out front, and at least one library visitor reported back that he had made his own box fan air filter after seeing the display.

Perhaps the most notable indicator of the program’s impact, however, showed up on Peck’s Main Street after the flag program began: One man, noticing that the flags were only updated the two days a week that the library was open, made his own flags to display in his front yard on the days the library was closed.

“To see that person using his own saw and equipment and taking all those steps to display a flag in his yard, and then going into a library and seeing that they have their fan filter going, has been really inspiring,” Boulafentis said. “It makes you want to say, ‘Hey, what should we try together next?’”

“For the community to get excited about it and then see other people participating,” Schmidt added, “brings out the good in us all.”

The post Rural Communities Find Unique Solutions to Protect Against Wildfire Smoke Exposure appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

If you’ve eaten a burger and fries recently, there’s a chance that the potatoes were picked by middle schoolers, working through the school day in a field in Idaho. The steer that became the beef patty may well have been killed at a slaughterhouse where teenagers work, and the bone saws used to process the meat could easily have been cleaned by a 13-year-old, wearing a bulky hard hat and oversized gloves. It’s also quite possible that the burger was grilled, flipped and assembled by a child working at McDonald’s on a school night, far later than federal law allows.

This sort of child labor—culled from thousands of examples in U.S. Department of Labor investigations—has been mostly illegal in the U.S. since the 1930s, but that hasn’t stopped a surprising number of companies from engaging in it. In February, the department announced that the nation is experiencing a sharp rise in child labor violations across all industries; since 2018, the agency has documented a 69-percent increase in children who were employed illegally.

The vast majority of employers committing this wave of violations have something in common: they grow, package, deliver, cook, sell and serve the nation’s food.

A FERN analysis of investigation data released by the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD)—which is tasked with enforcing federal child labor laws—found that more than 75 percent of recent violations were committed by employers in the food industry. The agency uncovered more than 12,000 child labor violations in the nation’s food system—out of 16,000 total violations across all industries—between Jan. 1, 2018 and Nov. 23, 2022, the most recent date for which data were publicly available. Investigators found minors working illegally at vegetable farms in Texas and Florida, at dairy farms in Minnesota and New Hampshire and at poultry plants in Alabama and Mississippi. Children are involved in every step of the food supply chain, working illegally from farm to table.

Restaurants were by far the worst offenders. More than 64 percent of all the violations were committed by food service employers. Culprits ranged from regional pizza chains to high-end restaurants, and certain fast food chains were well represented. McDonald’s franchises, for instance, committed 8.7 percent of the violations in the WHD data. The National Restaurant Association did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and McDonald’s declined to comment for publication.

Supermarkets and other food and beverage stores were well represented, too, responsible for 7.7 percent of the violations. In one particularly egregious example, from 2021, a 16-year-old supermarket worker in Clarksburg, Tennessee, was tasked with cleaning out a meat grinder, even though federal law prohibits employers from having minors clean or operate them. As the boy reached into the machine, the grinder switched on and ripped off half of his arm.

Most jobs that workers under the age of 18 do in this country are not considered child labor. The United Nations’ International Labour Organization defines child labor as work that is mentally or physically dangerous for children, interferes with their schooling or both, and U.S. law largely reflects that definition. For the most part, businesses are prohibited from hiring children younger than 14. Fourteen- and 15-year-olds can only work three hours a day on school days, and they can’t legally work during school hours, or take early morning or night shifts. Children under the age of 18 are barred from operating a range of hazardous machinery, like band saws and meat choppers.

Child labor is notoriously difficult to document, and while these data provide meaningful insight into industries that commit child labor violations, they also provide insight into the limitations of the agency’s investigations. Underfunded and understaffed, WHD is tasked with regulating more than 11 million employers with only about 800 investigators. Because of this, the agency mostly investigates companies it receives complaints about—and in many industries, labor violations are chronically underreported.

“What you’re seeing [in this data] is where we go,” a senior Wage and Hour Division official told FERN, referring to the fact that complaints drive the agency’s investigations.

Labor abuses in the restaurant industry frequently go unreported. In a report released by the UCLA Labor Center last year, more than a third of fast food workers surveyed said they’d kept quiet about dangerous conditions in their workplace and other issues, mostly because they were afraid they’d lose their jobs or certain shifts if they complained. And yet, the senior WHD official says, WHD investigators receive far more complaints about food service employers than other types of employers in the food system, such as farmers. “I’m sure a big part of that has to do with workers’ ability to get other jobs,” he says. While food service employers regularly retaliate against employees who speak out about labor violations, workers “could go to the restaurant across the street [for work],” he says. “So they might be more forthcoming to complain.”

The severity of the child labor violations that restaurants commit ranges widely. According to WHD officials, children often work earlier, later and longer hours than they’re supposed to, and in some cases, managers are unaware they’re breaking the law. Other violations are both deliberate and more severe. In 2020, WHD found that Manna Inc., a fast food franchise company, had hired 446 14- and 15-year-olds to work the graveyard shifts at nearly a hundred Wendy’s and Fazoli’s locations across the country. Last December, WHD fined a Chick-fil-A more than $6,000 after discovering it had illegally hired three teenagers, then paid several employees in chicken.

Teenage food service workers are often desperate for work. These are not “teenagers working [to buy] comic books or trading cards,” says Manuel Villanueva, the western regional director for the workers rights’ group Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United. “I’ve seen people manage to work three jobs just to get by, and then they have to send their kids to work.”

In Villanueva’s experience, abuses are particularly prevalent in the fast food industry, where hiring workers is outsourced to franchisees. “It’s a free-for-all,” he says. Because child workers lack seniority, he adds, they’re sometimes given dangerous jobs that other workers don’t want to do, like disposing of oil and cleaning deep fryers.

Agricultural jobs and certain food processing jobs, like meat and poultry processing, are particularly dangerous for child workers, but WHD also finds them particularly hard to investigate. Many child employees in food processing work night shifts at isolated facilities away from public view, and “that is not an industry that we are typically looking at at two in the morning,” says the senior WHD official. Farmworkers also tend to be physically isolated and routinely face workplace retaliation; many are undocumented, which can make workers all the more reluctant to speak out. Between January 2018 and November 2022, employers in food processing and agriculture collectively accounted for only about 3 percent of the child labor violations that WHD uncovered—but child labor is known to be widespread in both industries.

In February, WHD forced Packers Sanitation Services Inc. (PSSI), one of the country’s largest food safety sanitation service providers, to pay $1.5 million in civil penalties after investigators discovered the company had illegally employed over 100 children to work overnight shifts at 13 meat processing facilities. Teens as young as 13 worked the overnight shift, cleaning brisket saws and head splitters, and several child workers suffered chemical burns on the job. It was indicative of a much larger problem. In February, a New York Times investigation found that migrant child workers are routinely hired, illegally, by food processing companies, where they described feeling sick, exhausted and trapped by circumstances beyond their control.

Child labor also is commonplace in agriculture—though in many cases, it’s legal. Farmers are largely exempt from federal child labor laws, and children as young as 12 can work unlimited hours harvesting crops, provided they have their parents’ consent and they don’t miss school. As a result, hundreds of thousands of children under the age of 18 work on farms across the country. According to Human Rights Watch, children are often hired to work for 10 or more hours a day, five to seven days a week, in violation of the few federal laws that do apply. Agriculture also is the most dangerous work open to children in the United States; over half of all work-related child fatalities happen in agriculture, even though child farmworkers account for less than 5 percent of the country’s child workforce.

According to Edgar Franks, the political director for the farmworker’s union Familias Unidas por la Justicia, child farmworkers are often expected to work as quickly as adult workers, and they’re sometimes disciplined or even fired when they don’t. “There’s even pressure [for them] to go faster than experienced pickers,” he says, “because their bodies aren’t broken down yet.”

When FERN showed its findings to a dozen WHD officials, labor experts and organizers, many of them were unsurprised that child labor violations are so prevalent in the nation’s food system. In many ways, experts said, a confluence of economic trends and political decisions has made the food industry an ideal environment for this kind of exploitation.

David Weil, who served as the head of the Wage and Hour Division under the Obama administration, says the recent “explosion” of child labor violations has been a long time coming—and that he would expect these violations to be more prevalent in food-related industries.

According to Weil, the modern food industry has been shaped by several economic trends. Since the 1980s, major U.S. corporations have increasingly outsourced the hiring of employees to subcontractors and staffing agencies, which insulates them from liability. “The companies where child labor is being used, their first comment is, ‘I’m shocked that there are children working here,’” he says. “But their second comment is, ‘They’re not our employees.’”

At the same time, many employers also have had trouble hiring adult U.S. citizens, who can command better benefits and wages in the current strong job market. This apparent labor shortage has coincided with an immigration and humanitarian crisis. In the last two years, more than 250,000 unaccompanied minors have fled unrest in their home countries and sought refuge in the United States. According to multiple Times’ investigations, government agencies quickly lose track of them, and an increasing number of employers are hiring them illegally.

“It’s a little bit of chickens coming home to roost, I hate to say,” says Weil. “It’s the systemic result of all these forces coming together.”

The Department of Labor has launched an interagency task force to crack down on child labor exploitation, vowing to hold all employers accountable, including companies that hire employees through subcontractors. It also urged Congress to increase the fines that guilty employers are forced to pay; the maximum penalty for committing a child labor violation is $15,000, which WHD officials argue is far too low to deter any major corporation.

Weil is encouraged by these initiatives, but without more funding he thinks they’ll be difficult to deliver on. “You cannot adequately [provide] what the U.S. workplace needs in terms of enforcement with the amount of funding that Congress has been giving to these agencies,” he says.

House and Senate members are considering an increase in WHD’s funding and have proposed two bills that would more than triple the fines for child labor violations. In the meantime, state lawmakers across the country are moving in the opposite direction. Last month, Arkansas made it easier for employers to hire 14- and 15-year-olds, one of at least 10 states in the past two years that have introduced or passed legislation weakening child labor laws. “This is less time that they [kids] will be spending on social media, like TikTok and others,” said Republican Ohio State Sen. Jerry Cirino last month, after passing a bill that allows 14- and 15-year-olds to work later on school nights. The legislation is currently in committee.

Some labor experts hope increased unionization in the food industry could help address the problem. In an overwhelming number of child labor cases, “the direct employer is non-union,” says Debbie Berkowitz, who served as chief of staff and senior policy adviser for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) under the Obama Administration. “Unions make sure that this doesn’t happen.”

Unionization rates are still low throughout the food industry, but some organizers are optimistic—particularly about the young employees they work with.

“The kids of color that I work with,” says ROC United’s Manuel Villanueva, “they’re already politically educated. They’re like, no, this needs to change.”

Sonner Kehrt contributed reporting to this article.