In January, with the almond bloom in California’s orchards a month away, beekeepers across the country were fretting over their hives. A lot of their bees were dead, or sick. Beekeepers reported losing as much as half their hives over the winter.  Jack Brumley, a California beekeeper, said he’d heard of people losing 80 percent of their bees. Denise Qualls, a bee broker who connects keepers with growers, said she was seeing “a lot more panic occurring earlier.”

Rumors swirled of a potential shortage; almond growers scrambled to ensure they had enough bees to pollinate their valuable crop, reaching out to beekeepers as far away as Florida, striking deals with mom-and-pop operations that kept no more than a few hundred bees. NPR’s All Things Considered aired a segment on the looming crisis in the almond groves.

By May, it was clear that California’s almond growers — who supply 80 percent of the world’s almonds — had successfully negotiated the threat of a bee shortage, and were expected to produce a record crop of 2.5 billion pounds, up 10 percent from last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

But the panic, it turns out, was justified. The results of this year’s annual Bee Informed Partnership survey, a collaboration of leading research labs, released Wednesday, found that winter losses were nearly 38 percent, the highest rate since the survey began 13 years ago and almost 9-percent higher than the average loss.  

The panic underscored a fundamental problem with the relationship between almonds and bees: Every year the almond industry expands, while the population of honeybees, beset by a host of afflictions, struggles to keep pace.

“We are one poor weather event or high winter bee loss away from a pollination disaster,” Jeff Pettis, an entomologist who at the time was head of research at the USDA’s Bee Research Laboratory, said in 2012. And while the disaster Pettis warned of hasn’t struck yet, its likelihood grows each year.

There would be no almond industry without the honeybee, which so far is the only commercially-managed pollinator available in sufficient numbers  to work California’s almond fields. The industry is in the midst of a boom, as Americans eat more almonds than ever. We consume more than two pounds per person each year in our granola bars, cereals, milks, and regular old nuts, fueling an $11-billion market.

It’s not clear that boom is sustainable. Though concern about a bee shortage seemed acute this year, the pollination market for almonds has been tightening for more than a decade. In 2005, fear of a pollinator shortage was so great that the government allowed wholesale importation of honeybees for the first time since 1922.

California’s almond industry spreads over 1.4 million acres of the Central Valley. During bloom, which typically unfolds over three weeks in February, these orchards require the services of some 80 percent of all the honeybees in the country.

Honeybee colonies, on the other hand, have been dying at high rates. Historically, colonies died mostly during the winter. So when the Bee Informed Partnership started tracking colonies in 2007, it only looked at winter losses, which have ranged from 22 percent to this year’s nearly 38 percent. Along the way, researchers realized that beekeepers had started losing a surprising number of bees in the summer, too, a season when all should be going well for bees. They started tracking annual losses in 2013, which have ranged between 33 percent and 45 percent. The loss for the year ending March 31 was 41 percent.

The threat to the bees is multifaceted and existential. The varroa mite, an invasive species of external parasite that arrived in Florida in the 1980s, literally sucks the life out of bees and their brood. Herbicides and habitat loss have destroyed the bees’ forage. An array of pesticides, including dicamba and clothianidin, have been found to damage the bees’ health in a variety of ways, weakening their immune systems, for instance, and slowing their reproductive rate.

The process of getting the bees to the almonds adds another stressor. Each January, the sluggish bees are prodded into action much earlier than what would be their normal routine. They are fed substitutes for their natural foods of pollen and nectar so they will quickly repopulate the hive to be ready for almonds. They are then loaded onto trucks and shipped across the country, plopped in an empty field and fed more substitute food while they wait for almonds to bloom.

“We’ve had to bend the natural behavior of honeybees around almonds,” said Charley Nye, who runs the bee research operation at the University of California, Davis.

One reason beekeepers are less inclined to talk about this distortion of nature is that almond pollination has become their biggest single money-maker of the year, accounting for about one-third of their annual income in 2016. No other crop pays as well as almonds, so if a beekeeper misses almond pollination, it could cripple his business.

“They’re not dead, but if they don’t make it to almonds, then from an economic standpoint, they’re as good as dead,” said Gene Brandi, a California beekeeper, back in January when the panic was in full bloom.

In 2018, California had 1.1 million acres of almond trees bearing nuts and another 300,000 acres of trees still too young to need pollination. Each acre of mature trees is supposed to be pollinated by two honeybee colonies. There are between 10,000 and 15,000 bees in a colony when they arrive in the almond fields, and for the last four years, the U.S. has averaged 2.67 million colonies right before almond bloom.

You can do the math, but like Nye says: “As the almond acres grow, the demand for colonies seems to be outpacing the number of colonies that exist.”  

The tight market has forced growers and brokers to expand their search for bees. “It used to be that we only dealt with operations that managed at least a thousand to 3,000 hives,” said Pettis, the former USDA entomologist. “Now people are pulling bees from smaller and smaller operators. They’re pulling bees literally out of people’s backyards and putting them on trucks to pollinate almonds. And while we used to only move bees from west of the Mississippi River, now we go all the way to Florida and New York state.”

Growers are also hedging their bets by securing more bees than they actually need, a strategy that only exacerbates the tight market.

The intel used to gauge the number  of bees in the country is surprisingly imprecise. The bee count offers just a small snapshot in time and relies on beekeepers’ responses to a poll. The numbers are approximate, with undercounts more likely than overcounts. Yet the trend lines are clear: Unless something changes, at some point in the near future we won’t have enough bees.

Limiting colony losses is one way to change the trend. The honeybees’ biggest threat is the varroa mite. The USDA, Project Apis m., and both beekeepers and bee producers are currently conducting trials of a varroa-resistant bee that will work for commercial beekeepers. Also, researchers have been working for years on a backup to the honeybees for early-season crops like almonds. This bee, the blue orchard bee, is in the early stages of commercial production, and it will be years before it could make significant inroads in replacing some of the honeybees.

Meanwhile, there are signs that almond growers are becoming more amenable to bee-friendly practices such as modifying pesticide use and planting flowers in their orchards that would provide alternate forage for the bees while they wait for the almond bloom. Nye said some growers are getting “a little more sensitive to the job the honeybees are doing; they seem to be investing more in pollinators.”

Ultimately, a big part of the solution may be to reevaluate the number of colonies deployed per acre. “Those standards were set many, many, many years ago,” said Bob Curtis, a pollination consultant with the Almond Board of California, and a lot has changed since then.

For the last 12 years, almond groves have produced one-third more nuts than they did in the dozen years before that. Some orchard management practices have changed in that time, but growers also began requesting, and paying a premium for, stronger hives that contain more bees. Today, most of the colonies that go to almond groves contain twice as many bees as they did in decades past. Whether the higher production rate of the almond trees is due to more bees per colony, different management practices, or some combination of factors is hard to say.

Curtis said the Almond Board is undertaking new studies to determine if the stocking rate could be adjusted, which would ease the pressure on embattled beekeepers to keep up with the surging almonds.

A lower stocking rate would also ease the stress on the bees themselves, but it wouldn’t stop them from dying in excessive numbers. Reversing that trend will require dramatically different approaches to everything from how we farm to how we use our land — things not likely to change anytime soon. The disaster Pettis warned of remains a very real possibility. Honeybees continue to be in a fight for their lives.

SODUS, N.Y. — Daniel Bennett’s office at Sodus Intermediate School is a haven for kids in crisis.

When fourth, fifth or sixth graders here are fed up, ready to fight, or exhausting their teacher with their unfocused energy, they can visit Bennett’s office to jump on the mini trampoline, bounce on the balance ball chairs, or strum out their frustration on one of the guitars that hang on one wall.

Sometimes, the kids arrive angry, outraged at how they’ve been treated by a classmate or teacher; other times they show up sad, or overwhelmed. This spring morning, a boy came in crying, complaining he’d been treated unfairly during a game in gym class. He told Bennett he didn’t understand the game’s rules and was punished for breaking them.

Bennett, a doctoral student at Roberts Wesleyan College here on a year-long internship, helps each student identify their feelings, and validates them. While the student calms down, they might play a board game, shoot darts or mess with fidget toys.

On this day, though, the boy wasn’t interested in toys or games. He just wanted to talk — and be listened to.

“Sometimes you need to sit and be quiet,” Bennett said later.

Besides Bennett, Sodus Intermediate has two licensed psychologists on staff. But one functions as a school counselor, responsible for academic advising in addition to mental health counseling. Even with Bennett on board, it can be hard to meet the needs of all the kids and teachers in this low-income, rural district — especially since the pandemic.

“There’s a lot of trauma, and there are only so many hours in a day to meet with kids,” Bennett said.

Rates of anxiety and depression among youth and adolescents have reached record highs across the country, with the surgeon general calling kids’ declining mental health the “defining public health crisis of our time.” Yet, nationwide, there was just one school psychologist for every 1,127 K-12 students in 2020-21, a ratio well below the 500 students to one psychologist recommended by the National Association of School Psychologists. The shortages of school social workers and counselors are just as bad.

These deficits are due both to a lack of funding and a lack of providers. Some schools know they need more mental health providers, but they can’t afford to hire them. Others have the budget to hire, but can’t find a qualified provider. Colleges just aren’t producing enough of them, and low pay pushes some would-be school counselors into private practice or other specialties.

Now, spurred by an influx of federal funds, schools and colleges are undertaking an unprecedented effort to recruit and retain more school mental health providers. Districts are offering stipends to grad student interns, providing mentors to new hires, and creating online communities for isolated rural providers. Colleges are creating new programs to introduce high schoolers to school mental-health careers and launching virtual graduate degrees to attract busy professionals and far-flung students.

Bennett’s position at Sodus Intermediate, a 45-minute drive from Rochester, is funded through one of a pair of federal grant programs that received a huge funding increase in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, passed last year in response to the May 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary, in Uvalde, Texas. The grant programs are also part of President Joe Biden’s effort to double the number of school-based mental health professionals.

Since December, the U.S. Department of Education has awarded $286 million to 264 grantees in nearly every state to boost the training and hiring of school mental health professionals, particularly those from marginalized racial and ethnic backgrounds. The agency estimates that the infusion of cash will prepare more than 14,000 new providers. And that’s just a portion of the $1 billion funding increase, with the remaining grants to be doled out over the next five years.

Schools also spent an estimated $2 billion in federal pandemic recovery dollars to hire mental health professionals — an investment that helped increase the number of social workers by nearly 50 percent, and the number of school counselors and psychologists by 10 percent, according to the education department.

Nationwide, there is just one school psychologist for every 1,127 K-12 students, a ratio well below the 500 students to one psychologist recommended by the National Association of School Psychologists

Bennett, the son of a school psychologist, said he feels drawn to the mental health field. He briefly considered a career in law, but settled on psychology after working in an inpatient clinic for children and adolescents after college.

“There were cases that would break your heart,” Bennett said. “But it kept pulling me back.”

But with one week remaining on his internship, he’s not yet sold on a career in school counseling. He’s worked in several settings since starting his program in clinical and school psychology in 2020, and found interest in them all.

“I’m open to seeing where the wind takes me,” he said.

Related: A surprising remedy for teens in mental health crises

At lunchtime, Bennett hurries to the cafeteria to collect four rambunctious fifth grade boys for a skills group. Trays in hand, they race down the hall to Bennett’s office, scarfing up tater tots directly into their mouths.

The topic today is listening. The group starts with a silly song about being a “whole body listener,” drawing or coloring what they hear or think as they listen.

When the song ends, Bennett asks the students to describe their drawings and then share which classmate did the best job of listening while they spoke.

Josh holds up a picture of a guy playing with his ears, and Bennett asks what it represents.

“Hear teachers talk,” Josh answers.

“And who was the best listener?” Bennett asks.

“You,” Josh says. “Your eyes were on me, and you weren’t tapping the floor.”

Matt, who is dressed head-to-toe in Spider-man attire, jumps in to defend himself. “The way I focus and calm down is by fidgeting,” he explains.

Tim goes next. Licking a red popsicle, he holds a drawing of an all-green face in front of his own. “I drew me a new face so I can make more friends,” he says.

The phone rings, interrupting the sharing. It’s a teacher who wants to know if she can send a student who is in crisis. Bennett says he has five minutes after the skills group ends — after that he’s got to meet with another teacher.

He hangs up the phone and turns back to Tim. “What about this face will help you make friends?” he asks.

“It’s green,” Tim responds.

“And who was the best listener?” Bennett asks.

“Apollo — he was listening with his ears,” Tim says.

When the session ends, Bennett returns the boys to their classrooms, and picks up the student who the teacher had called about. As they walk to Bennett’s office, the student says that he accidentally squirted water on his teacher’s phone, and she smacked him on the arm. “Now I’m mad all day,” the student says.

They head back to Bennett’s office, where the student calms down by strumming on a guitar. Bennett asks the boy what type of music is his favorite (country, he says), and tells him he used to play bass in a high school band; he had hair down to his shoulders. They talk about the recent evaluation the student received for special education services, and the boy confides that he’s started a new medication.

When five minutes are up, Bennett tells the student it’s time to go. As the boy leaves, Bennett asks what one thing he could do to get through class.

“Ignore my teacher,” the student says.

“Let it wash off you like water,” Bennett says, encouragingly, before rushing to meet another teacher.

Related: School counselors keep kids on track. Why are they first to be cut?

Rural districts tend to have a harder time recruiting school psychologists, said Kelly Vaillancourt Strobach, director of policy and advocacy for the National Association of School Psychologists. There are fewer training programs near rural districts than near urban ones, and graduates often look for work close to where they’re trained, she said.

But even if more graduates were willing to relocate, the number of students graduating from programs in psychology, counseling and social work isn’t keeping pace with districts’ growing demand for mental health services. Opening up the programs to more students isn’t really an option, either — there aren’t enough faculty or site supervisors to train them, according to Strobach.

Another reason schools struggle to recruit and retain mental health providers is in part because of the low pay. (The average salary for a school psychologist is about $88,000; for clinical and counseling psychologists it’s $103,000; industrial psychologists, who work in businesses and organizations, earn an average of $145,000.)

Since December, the U.S. Department of Education has awarded $286 million to 264 grantees in nearly every state to boost the training and hiring of school mental health professionals, particularly those from marginalized racial and ethnic backgrounds.

In addition, schools often ask providers, especially school counselors, to take on administrative duties, like test proctoring and cafeteria and bathroom monitoring.

While counselors expect to perform some duties beyond their professional specialty, asking them to do too much “pulls them away from the work they’re passionate about” and contributes to counselor turnover, said Eric Sparks, deputy executive director of the American School Counselor Association.

New York is doing better than some states in hiring and retaining school psychologists: Its ratio is 1:662. But before the six districts received the grant, only 5 of 19 schools had a social worker on staff, Lustica said.

With the help of the federal dollars, the districts have been able to hire roughly 20 interns in psychology, social work and counseling each year for the past four years. They pay them a stipend and mileage — a rarity in graduate internships — and place them in interdisciplinary groups that meet twice a month to review cases and share ideas on how to approach them.

By paying their interns, and nurturing a spirit of collaboration among them, the districts hope to convince them to return to work in a school when they graduate. So far, that strategy seems to be working: More than three-quarters of former interns have been hired into high-need districts in New York, Lustica said.

Boston Public Schools is also using stipends to attract potential job candidates — particularly those that match the district’s demographics. Though Boston has had more success recruiting than many districts, it’s struggled to hire bilingual providers and those from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds, said Andria Amador, the district’s senior director of behavioral health services.

“Trying to enter a field that makes you work for free for two years is impossible for some of our economically disadvantaged populations,” Amador said.

“Trying to enter a field that makes you work for free for two years is impossible for some of our economically disadvantaged populations.”

Andria Amador, senior director of behavioral health services, Boston Public Schools

Other recipients of the federal grants are trying different approaches. In Texas, a “grow your own” program is paying teachers to pursue degrees in counseling; in Wisconsin, a new virtual master’s program is reaching Native students on reservations located hours from a college campus.

Leah M. Rouse, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee who is helping lead the effort to recruit Indigenous students, said that colleges used to be reluctant to offer online programs, worrying quality would suffer. But “the pandemic showed we can do quality training and supervision with remote instruction,” she said.

Nevada, which in 2021 had just one school psychologist for every 2,000 students, has started recruiting in high school, offering a course on school mental health professions that lets high schoolers earn college credit. Its colleges have begun training “school psychology assistants” to take over some of the administrative duties placed on licensed school psychologists, freeing them to spend more time with students.

And in Virginia, educators are tackling high turnover among isolated rural providers through an online professional development program that connects the providers to colleagues in other schools.

Related: Campus religious groups step into a new realm: mental health counseling

Back at Sodus Intermediate, Bennett is running late for his meeting with Jennifer Gibson, a longtime special education teacher with a challenging class. But when he arrives in the cafeteria, Gibson isn’t there. She shows up a minute later, saying she got caught up disciplining kids.

Bennett and Gibson meet fairly often to discuss strategies for dealing with difficult student behaviors, he says. Their sessions typically start with venting, and this day is no exception.

“I love the community in schools — getting to eat lunch with colleagues, being surrounded by youngsters. But it would be very hard to support myself on the entry level salaries in this setting.”

Daniel Bennett, doctoral student on a year-long internship as a school counselor

Gibson tells Bennett she’s relieved that a particularly disruptive student has left her class, and frustrated that he was put there to begin with.

“He would have been better served elsewhere, don’t you think?” she asks Bennett.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I hear your frustration.”

Then, they move on to problem-solving. Bennett asks Gibson what she was disciplining students for.

“Just kids being sassy,” she says. One student, in particular, wouldn’t settle down after lunch.

“What do you think was the reason?” Bennett asks.

Gibson speculates that it might have been the change in seasons — the warmer weather always makes transitions harder.

Then Gibson remembers that the student hadn’t eaten; he’d hit a kid on the bus and spent the lunch period in suspension. She’d forgotten to give him his usual “brain break” after lunch, too.

“So that’s my fault,” she says, guiltily.

“There’s no blaming or shaming here,” Bennett reminds her. They discuss how Gibson can ensure the student gets his energy out before returning to class after lunch.

At one point in the meeting, Gibson asks Bennett when his last day is. Next Thursday, he tells her.

“That’s awful,” she says. “I wish we could pay to hire you.”

More than three-quarters of former interns have been hired into high-need districts in New York via a federal grant program.

Stephen Humbert, Bennett’s supervisor and the school’s practicing psychologist, said having interns in the building two days a week helps him support more students and teachers. It also exposes staff to fresh ideas and theories, he said.

But Bennett, who starts a new internship at a healthcare organization in Pennsylvania later this month, now doubts he’ll settle in a school when he finishes his doctoral program next spring. With $150,000 in student debt, he’ll need to find something a little more lucrative.

“I love the community in schools — getting to eat lunch with colleagues, being surrounded by youngsters,” Bennett wrote in an e-mail on the last day of his internship. “But it would be very hard to support myself on the entry level salaries in this setting.”

This story about federal grants for counseling 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 The school counselor pipeline is broken. Can new federal money fix it? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Here in the Western U.S., smoke season has become a summer ritual. It’s never enjoyable and never routine, but far too common to brush off: Days too choked with smoke to go outdoors, weeks of scratchy throats and headaches, constant low-level anxiety about fire and health impacts.

But so far the heavy smoke has mostly clung to the Western half of the country.

So it’s strange to see it take hold in New York City: That familiar smoky orange haze hanging over skyscrapers, enveloping the Statue of Liberty, smogging up the streets. Sorry to say this, Northeasterners, but welcome to our reality. Our sympathies. It’s stressful and suffocating and disorienting. We get it.

But for better or for worse, though, we’ve developed some coping strategies that some might find useful. So from your friends out West, here are some tips on surviving smoke season:

The first time Oakland was fully socked in with smoke a few years ago — the sun didn’t come out for a day or two, which was really eerie and frightening — I was shocked that some people just tried to keep on with their workdays. It helped me a lot to pull back and take time for what was really going on: grief. THIS IS NOT NORMAL, and trying to go on with my regular day made it feel even worse. I ended up strapping on an N-95 mask and going for a really short walk to take in how totally scary and weird it was in my neighborhood. That was a physical health risk, to be sure, but it helped my mental health to fully process what was going on. And I ran into other neighbors who were walking their dogs or doing the same thing I was. Connecting over the scariness of it all helped, too.

—Sarah Trent, editorial intern

“All is changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”

If you know someone with COPD, asthma or similar diseases — in my case, a vulnerable family member — try to find ways to help them so they don’t have to leave their house. Fetch groceries, pet food, mail, etc., if you can, and make sure that they have necessary prescriptions, especially inhalers, and that their cooling system is working as well as possible — which is not easy for poor folks living in challenging conditions, I know. Like Sarah, I sometimes masked up (thank you, Dr. Fauci!) to go for walks outside, because walking is necessary to me, and besides, if I stayed inside too long, the climate grief and depression overwhelmed me — but I certainly avoided any outdoor activities that might require heavy breathing. You never really get used to it — or even accept that it’s actually happening to a place you love so dearly. It was strange, but at times the light was eerily magical; sometimes I thought of Yeats: “All is changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”

 —Diane Sylvain, copy editor

A home air filter is about the same size as a box fan. You can duct-tape one to the back/intake side of the fan and turn the fan on. It’s an inexpensive way to filter particles out of the air indoors.

— Toastie Oaster, staff writer

The light is different, the air can feel strange, time passes differently. You’re not going crazy; it is really disorienting. I found it helpful to remind myself this was just going to be weird and find ways to ground myself. For example, cold showers help with the vaguely sooty, sweaty feeling. Also: That headache? Yes, it probably IS because of smoke.

Also: Use your COVID toolkit. Maybe you got yourself an air purifier or rigged up a makeshift one. Put that back in action! Did you get a humidifier to help with COVID symptoms? That may help ease your throat scratchiness. If you have to go outside, your N95 mask will help protect you, although it isn’t going to block everything.

 —Kate Schimel, news and investigations editor

“Fire season” is a household phrase here, as depressing as that is. But I noticed that like the grinding doldrums of the pandemic, we slowly found ways to process the nightmare through humor and memes — all small acts of defiance against something larger than ourselves and largely out of our control. So share that selfie with the hellish sunset! Become Vin Diesel in The Chronicles of Riddick! For once, we all get to be in on the same pitch-black joke. And If you’re a nerd like me, you might also find that mapping the inferno provides a small measure of calm: it’s nice to know thy enemy, so to speak. Here’s a NASA tool where you can put a face to that flaming monster with satellite imagery. 

—Samuel Shaw, editorial intern

If you have young kids, find out where the indoor tumbling classes are to keep them occupied. And I think it helps to invest in a good map app that can show you smoke paths, like OpenSummit.

 —Michael Schrantz, marketing communications manager

I boil rosemary. Somebody told me it purifies the air by binding to smoke particles. I have no idea if this is actually true, but the added humidity and pleasant smell make me feel better when my asthma acts up during smoke events.

There’s value in rituals of healing, something as simple as sipping tea or massaging oil onto a strained muscle. Even if it turns out whatever the tea was made of, or whatever was infused in the oil, doesn’t have any extra health benefit, the act of noticing an ill and paying attention to it does. These things allow me to pause, admit there is a problem, and feel for a moment that I have some agency over a solution.

 —Luna Anna Archey, associate visuals editor

When it looks, feels and smells like the world is ending, don’t expect you’ll be at peak physical and mental performance.

Wildfire smoke will wreck more than your lungs. Ash can also damage vehicles and other items outdoors if you try to wash it off with water: The particulate wood ash reacts to form a weak lye solution that can damage your paint. Keep vehicles indoors, or cover them if you can. If not, try to brush the ash off rather than rinsing it. In a pinch, putting a wet bandanna over your nose and mouth can help with the worst effects of smoke.

Also, it’s normal for orange skies and the eerie, blood-red sun to affect your mood and mental health. Symptoms of smoke exposure, like shortness of breath and a vague, general feeling of unwellness, mirror and can exacerbate anxiety symptoms. When it looks, feels and smells like the world is ending, don’t expect you’ll be at peak physical and mental performance.

 —Rachel Alexander, managing editor at Salem Reporter

Being surrounded by wildfire smoke soup often makes me feel powerless and hopeless. It’s hard to feel safe when systemic forces and global problems — climate change, forest management — seep across borders and make your lungs, throat, eyes and head hurt. But I’d encourage people experiencing wildfire smoke for the first time to protect themselves, and then push for change that lasts after the smoke dissipates and protects the most vulnerable. Disasters can be pivotal moments, and action is an antidote to despair. Demand that wildfire fighters, who are on the frontlines of these blazes, receive adequate compensation and health care. Demand that farmworkers, who harvest food when the rest of us hole up inside, receive adequate protections from smoke (and heat!). Demand that people living without shelter have access to clean indoor air. Don’t just buy an air filter and go back to normal.

—Kylie Mohr, editorial fellow

Being an avid walker and hiker is difficult during wildfire smoke events. Some days it’s simply not feasible or advisable to exercise out of doors (purple and red days!). But other days, especially for those who don’t have health issues that make them particularly vulnerable to marginal air quality, it can be done. I watch the air quality index (AQI) throughout the day and choose my walking/hiking time based on air-quality reports. I also watch different air-monitoring stations throughout my area, and choose my walking/hiking locations based on AQI, which can be variable even locally. Sometimes I will take a walk wearing a N95 mask. I don’t do more strenuous walking or hiking masked, though. On days when it’s better to stay inside, I use a stationary bicycle to get my cardio fix. During the Thomas Fire of 2017-2018 (which burned for over a month), air quality was so bad for such a prolonged time that I and many others in our area who had the ability to do so simply packed up and left home.

—Jennifer Sahn, editor in chief

I grew up in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. The summer after college, I went to Montana for eight weeks of field ecology classes (maybe I was done with college, but college wasn’t quite done with me). On the last day of the program, I woke to the hazy hot air and lurid neon-red sun that now, after more than 15 years of living in the West, I’m very familiar with. That day felt like the Apocalypse or the End Times — something biblical, something entirely beyond my previous understanding of what the world could even be. What I’ve learned since then is that the smoky days will always be hard and scary, but they do pass. One day it will rain, one day I’ll be able to see the distant hills from my back deck, one day the morning sun will be as yellow as the roses blooming in my neighbor’s yard.

—Emily Benson, senior editor-north

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