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

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.

Devon Parfait steers his truck into the parking lot of what used to be a firehouse on Shrimpers Row in Dulac, Louisiana. He tries to get his bearings in a landscape both familiar and strange. He spies a bayou down a side street, so we walk in that direction, searching for traces of the home his family fled as Hurricane Rita barreled in. Back then, in 2005, Parfait was a second grader who collected Ranger Rick Zoobooks. Today he’s a 25-year-old coastal scientist with a mop of curls, a nose ring, and a puzzled look in his brown eyes.

“I’m scanning through the memory of all my old neurons,” he tells me. “Maybe this is it. Maybe it really has just changed so much I don’t even recognize it.”

Parfait’s January 2023 visit isn’t just for nostalgia. He’s the new chief of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, and he’s getting reacquainted with his community. The 1,100-citizen tribe has traditionally fished and hunted along this fertile edge of the Gulf of Mexico. But human engineering and extreme storms have reshaped Louisiana’s coastline, swallowing up 2,000 square miles of land since the 1930s. Many of the land patents granted to the tribe’s ancestors in a 19th-century treaty are now largely or wholly underwater. Land loss has chiseled away at tribal livelihoods and traditional diets, exacted a toll on citizens’ mental health, exacerbated chronic illnesses, and displaced families.

The Grand Caillou/Dulac Band and its neighbors also serve as harbingers of a climate crisis that threatens more intense high-tide floods on every U.S. coast by the mid-2030s. Unless protective measures are taken, rising waters could displace up to 13 million Americans by century’s end—“a magnitude similar to the twentieth century Great Migration of southern African-Americans,” wrote the authors of a 2016 University of Georgia analysis.

As we stand alongside the bayou, overshadowed by tall dry grass, a car pulls up to a nearby house. An older couple gets out and Parfait approaches them. “I’m trying to figure out if this is the place I used to live,” he says, naming his grandparents.

“I’m a Parfait,” the woman volunteers.

“Oh! Hey! Give me a hug then,” the chief says.

The couple lead Parfait to the footprint of his old home, now a garden bed that, later in the year, will produce mustard greens, speckled butter beans, and tomatoes. A fig tree Parfait remembers remains, but the rope swing of his childhood has vanished. The couple, who have lived here almost 50 years, say the land has eroded so much that the backmost six feet of their property has crumbled into the bayou.

Parfait understands the changes he sees represent both an existential crisis and a leadership burden. He prepared for this moment by leaving Louisiana to study geosciences. Now he’s back, crafting a plan to hold his tribe together, and shaking the hands he needs to get it rolling. Still, he’s cognizant of the obstacles ahead.

Coastal land loss has upended life in South Louisiana—for Cajun, Black, and Creole residents, for Vietnamese refugees and their descendants, and in particular for the half-dozen Indigenous tribes that rely on the abundance of its wetlands. Some 11,000 Native Americans live in the four coastal parishes (counties) with the highest Indigenous concentrations—flat expanses of two-lane roads that parallel bayous lined with oaks, elevated houses, and shrimp boats, and occasionally converge on small, industry-thick cities.

Cleveland “Coco” Rodrigue, a 61-year-old shrimper and citizen of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band, says he used to walk into the woods near his house in Dulac and hunt ducks and rabbits—“live off the land.” But those woods are gone, replaced by water. “Now, you step out your back door,” he says, “you’re going to sink.”

These losses stem from vast projects that altered the Mississippi River and its delta. The building of flood-control levees, according to many scientists, has prevented sediment from reaching and replenishing wetlands that naturally subside. The dredging of 10,000 miles of artificial canals by oil and gas companies altered the delta’s hydrology. Shipping channels allow saltwater to penetrate inland. Until recently, climate change was a minor factor, but now accelerating sea-level rise threatens even more inundation. Fewer wetlands mean less protection from hurricanes, which lately have intensified. The storms themselves erode the coast—a feedback loop of destruction.

Land loss impedes not just hunting and trapping but also raising livestock. Vegetable gardens face higher flood risk. Fishing and shrimping have become dicier, partly because the wetlands serve as nurseries for aquatic animals. Loss of natural food sources mean tribal citizens now have to rely more on grocery stores than in the past. But historic discrimination, like being kept out of public schools until the 1940s, has created barriers to wealth that have spanned generations. In the parish that includes Dulac, the poverty rate is 30 percent for Native Americans and 12 percent for non-Hispanic White people.

“When you don’t have the funds to purchase foods that are healthier, or better quality, you’re going to get what you can get [to] fill your stomach,” says Shirell Parfait-Dardar, Parfait’s predecessor as chief. Alongside this shift toward less healthy processed food, she has seen a rise in heart disease and diabetes.

Parfait-Dardar’s anecdotal observations square with national figures (local data are hard to come by). Native Americans, for whom diabetes was once rare, now have twice the rate of White Americans. Obesity and cardiovascular illness run rampant, too. A key culprit is the shift from traditional to Western diets, whether because of forced migration, environmental degradation, or government policies like the mandated thinning of livestock herds.

Beyond dietary disease, tribal leaders describe crushing stress from living in a place that’s increasingly uninhabitable. “Everyone here is suffering from PTSD, myself included,” says Parfait-Dardar, whose home Hurricane Ida leveled in 2021. Researchers studying the Gulf Coast have seen domestic abuse and substance-use disorders spike after hurricanes. The former chief has seen similar patterns in her tribe.

Health experts call the psychological and dietary tolls inseparable. “Stress triggers hormones that let you eat more, and eat more junk,” says Maureen Lichtveld, dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, who has researched and collaborated with Indigenous people in the Louisiana bayous. “Stress also triggers sleeping less. A short night’s rest actually increases obesity. So, the physiological consequences of stress feed into the social consequences of stress. And that, I think, is a cycle very difficult to break.”

Julie Maldonado, an anthropologist who has studied Louisiana’s tribes and is now working with them on issues like climate adaptation, says contemporary stresses are intertwined with a collective trauma that stretches back centuries. European colonization set the stage for the altered coastal landscape, the pollution, the hurricane damage, the growing untenability of commercial fishing, the scattering of neighbors.

“What people often talk about is a legacy of atrocities, or these cascading effects as these disasters are layered upon each other over time,” says Maldonado, associate director of the non-profit Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network and a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Now, as these climate-driven events get closer together, become more intense…you’re still recovering from one when the next one hits.”

That’s a lot of history to place on the shoulders of a Generation Z chief. But Parfait is in an unusual position: He knows firsthand how environmental changes can affect a community’s health, and he has done the academic work to help him address the underlying causes.

The summer of 2005, when Parfait’s family was forced from its home, was especially bad for land loss: Hurricanes Katrina and Rita alone claimed 217 square miles. After Rita destroyed the house and ruined his grandfather’s shrimp boat, the three-generation family uprooted three times. They traveled a 200-mile circuit before settling into the New Orleans suburb of Marrero. Parfait’s mother, Dana, wanted him to have a male mentor, so she sent him to live with her brother. But his uncle was also struggling, and eventually committed suicide.

Already diagnosed with ADHD (a condition linked to childhood trauma) and depression, Parfait retreated into himself. “He rarely came out of his room,” says his mother. He failed his freshman year of high school.

But Parfait’s curious mind caught the attention of his mother’s cousin, then-chief Parfait-Dardar. As early as age 12, he watched her try to gain federal recognition for the tribe, a cumbersome, elusive, ongoing process that could bring financial benefits and self-governance rights. He asked questions and offered to help, and over time Parfait-Dardar identified him as her eventual successor. (Each chief names the next.) “When I recognized that it was him—and I still get chills today—it was like the ancestors spoke,” she says.

To face the tribe’s issues, Parfait needed a specific kind of education. It happened that the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band has a relationship with the Williams-Mystic Program, a collaboration of Williams College and Mystic Seaport Museum that runs a coastal field seminar in Louisiana. Rónadh Cox, a geosciences professor at Williams and seminar instructor, invited him to a scientific meeting in 2017, noticed his drive and curiosity, and wondered if her school might entertain a transfer from his community college. “This could be a moment where we can do something,” she remembers thinking, “to make a difference, to give back to the tribe.”

Admissions officers at Williams, a competitive liberal arts college, looked at Parfait’s grades and declined his application. After another year of academic preparation, he reapplied to Williams and this time was accepted. At Williams, Parfait studied geosciences and collaborated with Cox on several mapping projects related to the tribe’s historic territory. One showed the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band and nearby Jean Charles Choctaw Nation were losing land faster than the surrounding basins, and at more than double the rate of Louisiana’s entire coast.

Parfait always imagined his tenure as tribal chief would begin in the distant future. But as he was finishing up his undergraduate degree in 2022, Parfait-Dardar called to say she was ready to step down. “I knew what we were facing,” she says: further land loss, potential dispersion, continued public health challenges. “And Devon had the education that I don’t have.” Knowing the burden Parfait would be taking on, the outgoing chief also called his mother. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

After graduating, Parfait returned home and started working as a coastal science coordinator for the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). In August 2022, he recited the oath of office at a kitchen-table ceremony scaled down for the pandemic. That same month, he turned 25.

One of Parfait’s first orders of business as chief was to assist an intertribal effort to get the federal government’s attention. The Grand Caillou/Dulac Band had teamed up with four other tribes—one from Alaska, the others from Louisiana—that have seen their traditional lands disappear. The five had petitioned for a hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), alleging that the government had failed to protect them from the impacts of climate change and other human-caused disasters.

The consequences, the petition claimed, amounted to a forcible displacement. Grand Bayou Indian Village, home to the Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha, has lost nearly all its land; the handful of remaining houses sit on pilings and can only be reached by boat. Jean Charles Choctaw Nation has watched its ancestral island erode down to a sliver and the state’s relocation plans devolve into conflict over how much decision-making power the tribe would retain.

The IACHR, part of the Organization of American States, had scheduled a hearing for October, two months after Parfait’s swearing-in. The commission lacks binding powers for the U.S. government, “but it’s still important,” says Maryum Jordan, an attorney with EarthRights International who worked with the tribes on the hearing. “This is a key moment to put displacement on the radar at the international level. And it’s also an opportunity to pressure the government to do more.”

The hearing was online, but there were private in-person meetings, too. The day before, Parfait took an early-morning flight to Washington, D.C., where the team huddled over sandwiches and cupcakes, crafting testimony and supplemental material. They met with a White House official. And they talked with an IACHR attorney to provide more context than they could squeeze into the 90-minute hearing. Parfait talked about how colonialism had altered the coastal environment, making it harder for the tribes to stay self-sufficient.

The next day, Parfait watched off-camera as his predecessor, Parfait-Dardar, logged in from a hotel ballroom in Thibodaux, Louisiana—in her emerita role as elder chief, she retains moral authority and years of knowledge. She sat at a conference table with Rosina Philippe, an elder from Grand Bayou. Tribal banners hung behind them.

“The lands once lush and fruitful have eroded away, so that all that remains today are strips of land that stick out like fragile fingers on a badly wounded hand,” Parfait-Dardar testified. The declining harvest, compounded by education discrimination, “has led us into lifeways that have also caused negative consequences for our mental and physical health.” And without federal recognition, she said, the tribe can’t secure the funding it needs to recover from hurricanes and adapt to climate change.

After Parfait-Dardar and three other tribal representatives made their case, the U.S. government responded. Department of Interior staffer Joaquin Gallegos, who is from the Jicarilla Apache Nation and the Pueblo of Santa Ana, acknowledged that climate change poses “existential threats” to Native economies and health. But, Gallegos said, the government “takes its political and legal responsibilities to Indigenous people seriously,” funding climate-resilience programs, supporting traditional food systems like fisheries, and consulting with tribes on issues like relocation.

Still, the panel seemed alarmed by the tribes’ testimony. “Why is it taking so long…to assist these communities?” asked commissioner Margarette May Macaulay, a Jamaican attorney. She announced the IACHR would submit an official request to visit Louisiana and Alaska. “Around the world,” she said, Indigenous tribes “have the least footprint and suffer the greatest crisis from climate change, which is committed by the industrialized state in pursuing industrialized profits.”

Then the laptop screen went dark. Parfait-Dardar turned to Philippe. “OK,” she said. “We survived.”

Philippe exhaled. She had watched the federal officials talk about collaboration. But that didn’t square with her own experience of a process that solicits tribal input without any real intention of disrupting the oil-and-gas economy. “The government—they maintain that whip hand,” she said. “So they can tout and say, ‘We are engaging the tribal communities.’ …But in the end product, we don’t see our suggestions. We see them just forging ahead with what they planned to do in the beginning.”

As winter approaches, Parfait confronts the enormity of his unpaid role as chief. His tribe’s mental and physical health, limited food access, and economic insecurity all demand attention, but so does his full-time day job at EDF. “I can’t do everything,” he says.

Sometimes, public-health problems require action in areas that look tangential but are actually foundational. “You could treat that diabetes, you could tell people to walk,” but health is collective, too, says the University of Pittsburgh’s Lichtveld. “The sense of community cohesion, or the gaps in it, in Indigenous communities is very strong.”

And so Parfait gravitates toward the issue that, to him, undergirds all the others. “How do you live a healthy, happy, productive life,” he says, “when you can physically see your lands eroding away in your backyard?” He fixes on a primary task: pushing for coastal restoration efforts that would slow the degradation enough for his tribe to plan an orderly retreat.

Louisiana has a 50-year, $50 billion coastal master plan, released in 2007 and updated every five to six years. Some of the funding comes from a Deepwater Horizon oil-spill settlement. But no amount of money can fix the entire coast. “It’s not like restoring a chair, where you’re going to strip the old varnish off and put some new stuff on, and it’s going to look exactly the same as it was,” says Denise Reed, a coastal geomorphologist at the University of New Orleans and a member of the master plan development team. “If you have limited resources, where are you going to put them? Where can you achieve most of your objectives?”

A keystone of the state’s coastal program is the $2.3 billion Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion: a gated structure, built into the levee system downriver from New Orleans, that will allow river water and sediment to flow back into the delta. According to the 2023 draft update to the master plan, the diversion could build 21 square miles of new land over the next half-century. “That will serve to protect everything inland,” says Kelly Sanks, a Tulane University sedimentologist. “From a protection-of-New-Orleans standpoint, it’s good and lots of people want it,” including a coalition of large environmental groups.

But the diversion will make flooding more severe for the Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha in nearby Grand Bayou, and tribes like Grand Caillou/Dulac live too far from the river to benefit.

“So it costs billions of dollars,” Parfait tells me. “It only benefits people 50 years from now. And it does nothing to help the tribal communities.”

The state’s plan acknowledges that some places won’t survive intact. For those residents, it recommends voluntary property acquisition and relocation assistance. This is not a reassuring prospect for Native Americans who watched Jean Charles Choctaw Nation’s dispute with the state over resettlement. “[It] indicates to these communities who are on the frontlines that people have given up on them,” Parfait says.

The chief understands that land loss might continue to force the tribe inland. But he wants the state to invest more in slowing down that loss—“buying time” to prevent citizens from dispersing helter-skelter as his family did after Hurricane Rita. “If you were to do coastal restoration projects to save the land now, and have that community stay there and develop a plan, you have a better chance to save culture, to keep the community cohesive, and to keep families together,” he says.

Topping Parfait’s priority list: seeing those oil-and-gas canals backfilled with the piles of dredged material that run parallel to them. This, some researchers say, could help restore the hydrology the canals wrecked decades ago. The tribes have consulted with R. Eugene Turner, a coastal ecologist at Louisiana State University who calls backfilling a cheap, fast, and effective way to rebuild wetlands. Those wetlands, he says, would in turn provide habitat for the seafood and game that make up the traditional Indigenous diet.

Stuart Brown, the state official who oversees the plan’s development, calls backfilling “one of many tools in the toolbox, not a panacea.” But after meeting with Turner and tribal leaders, he added one sentence to the 2023 draft endorsing the practice. “Now,” he says, “those seeking funding for it can go to the master plan and specifically say, ‘Look, it’s consistent with the plan.’”

When Parfait saw the draft update, he initially had mixed feelings: happy that backfilling got mentioned at all, and saddened by the brevity. “It is kind of an asterisk,” he says.

But he has moved past his disappointment and now views that sentence as a potential pipeline. “It feels like they’re saying, ‘Hey, connect,’” he says. “And that’s exactly what I’m doing.” His calendar is filling with meetings, and his head with strategies. He has met with local officials about a potential backfilling demonstration project that, if it comes about, would be managed by the parish government with tribal input. If that project succeeds, Parfait hopes it will nudge backfilling higher on the state’s priority list.

Parfait often thinks in stories; he calls this a product of his Indigenous heritage. “When I leave this world, what story do I want my life to represent?” he asks. “I don’t want to move forward into a world where we have to be constantly displaced, where we have to be constantly worried about our next meal, where we have to be constantly worried about land loss.” He thinks about his 8-year-old self, fleeing the bayou without his Zoobooks, and all the upheavals he has experienced since. Those memories remain close, guiding his plans for the future.

Listen to this story on The California Report

Allensworth, a farmworker town of about 500 people in California’s San Joaquin Valley, sits at the edge of an area called the Tulare Lake Basin, a patchwork of scrub brush and irrigated farmland that’s part of the most productive agricultural region in the nation. Last March, California’s barrage of atmospheric rivers overwhelmed the area, flooding pistachio orchards and swamping communities, and Allensworth found itself all but surrounded by a shallow sea. Residents were told to evacuate. They were also told that this flood was just the beginning.

California is fighting a slow-motion disaster, one that could become its largest flood in recent history. As the near-record snowpack in the Sierra mountains melts, the water making its way through the foothills is pooling in the basin, reviving a lake that had long disappeared. This process is expected to accelerate over the coming weeks and months, and it could take up to two years to subside. And while the return of Tulare Lake could devastate everyone in the region, historically disenfranchised communities like Allensworth are uniquely vulnerable. 

“It’s a horrific situation,” said Denise Kadara, an Allensworth community leader and the vice chair of the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board. “We’re here like sitting ducks, waiting for the water to come and flood us out.”

Part of Allensworth’s problem stems from the politics of water: For over a hundred years, water in the Tulare Lake Basin has been controlled and hoarded by a handful of powerful landowners, usually at the expense of everyone else. The Basin’s water management system still favors those powerful landowners, leaving the town with little recourse when floodwaters approach. 

‘I don’t need a whole bunch of people to break the law’

That was evident one windy night in March, when Allensworth residents Takoa Kadara and his father, Kayode, called an emergency town meeting. The goal was simple: to keep the water massing in the basin from pouring into people’s homes.

At the time, water was flowing toward town through culverts that run under railroad tracks to the east. The culverts are on private property, and the tracks that run on top of them are owned by BNSF Railway, one of the top freight transportation companies in the nation. The last time community members tried to block the culverts with rocks, gravel and plywood, a BNSF employee called the police, then removed the makeshift dam they had built. 

Now the group wanted to protect the community, but knew they might be at risk of breaking the law. Residents only saw two options: act illegally, or not at all, and they couldn’t come to an agreement.

“If you guys disagree with this solution, then let’s go home,” Kayode Kadara said.

“No, it’s not, ‘let’s go home!” his son, Takoa Kadara, said, “let’s come up with another solution.”

“I’ll just say it like it is,” said one resident, who declined to give his name. “If I’m gonna break the law, I don’t need a whole bunch of people to break the law [with me]. Ten minutes? We’re gone.”

Allensworth residents have tried to block the culverts legally—many, many times. But BNSF wouldn’t give them permission to do it, and so far, the town hasn’t been able to find a government agency with the power to override the corporation’s decision, or persuade it to reconsider. Their local stormwater district doesn’t have jurisdiction over the railroad’s property, and representatives from several state agencies, including Caltrans, CalFire and the Department of Water Resources, said they couldn’t do anything either, even though community members said those agencies agreed that the water spilling through the culverts is a problem. 

BNSF did not respond to requests for comment, but in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, a company spokesperson claimed that blocking the culverts could damage their tracks.

When Allensworth was put under a mandatory evacuation order back in March, the Kadaras and most of their neighbors refused to leave. Who would defend their town if they did?

“The water flowing is natural,” said Denise Kadara. But added it’s also determined by men who say “‘This is where they want the water to go.’”

The history behind today’s water politics

To understand the power dynamics in the Tulare Lake Basin—and how Allensworth ended up on the losing side of it—we have to go back to when the town was founded and Tulare Lake was still alive. In 1908, Lt. Col. Allen Allensworth was a formerly enslaved person who had become the highest ranking Black military officer of his time. As Jim Crow tightened its grip throughout the South, he moved to California to create what he hoped would become the “Tuskegee of the West,” a thriving Black community and college town. Founded by a dream team of Black doctors, professors and farmers, the community of Allensworth became the first town in California to be founded, financed and governed by Black Americans.

Allensworth picked a spot near Tulare Lake, which used to be the largest lake west of the Mississippi. Accounts from the late 1800s describe it as shallow, thick with tule reeds, and ringed by marshland. Herds of elk waded through the shallows, and millions of migratory birds flocked to its shores every year.

But by the time Lt. Col. Allensworth got there, the lake was rapidly disappearing—it had been for years.

“Geologists call that end of the San Joaquin Valley one of the most engineered landscapes in human history,” said Mark Arax, a journalist and expert in the Central Valley’s history and water politics. “[The] human hand has altered that land in a way that few places have been altered.”

Allensworth’s residents weren’t the only people who’d settled along Tulare Lake. A group of white landowners had settled there, too—some of them descending from slave-owning families.

“Many of them were Southerners who’d come from the Confederate states,” said Arax. “They arrived here and they started grabbing the snow melt out of those rivers, and then diverting that onto their farmland.”

In the 1920s, two particularly bold landowner families, the Boswells and the Salyers, made a move on the lakebed itself. The soil at the bottom was dark and unusually rich; it’d be the perfect place for a farm, if the lake wasn’t in the way. So they drained it and diverted the water for irrigation. According to Arax, those diversions ended up drying up the lake completely.

Meanwhile, Allensworth couldn’t get enough water to sustain itself, no matter how hard the community tried. White farmers diverted a river they relied on. A white-owned company refused to dig the community’s wells, but it was more than happy to dig wells for a white town nearby. By the 1920s, a lot of Allensworth’s original settlers had moved away. And by the 1940s, the white landowners in the Tulare Lake Basin had become some of the most powerful farmers in the country, and had successfully seized control of the water for themselves.

Those long-established power dynamics are still at work in the region. Today, Allensworth is a farmworker town where the tap water isn’t safe to drink. Many of its neighbors are large corporations and wealthy farmers, and they control many local agencies—like water and reclamation districts—which make decisions about who gets water in dry years and what to do when the floods come.

“You have these quasi-government agencies, but they’re controlled by the biggest landowners,” says Arax. “It’s a no man’s land in a lot of ways, and that’s the way it’s operated. It resorts to its own devices all the time.”

The Tulare Lake Basin also has a long history of levee sabotage. Historically, when the basin has flooded, some farmers cut levees and blocked canals to protect their land, but it also threatened the town with flooding. This is still happening today. Denise Kadara remembers getting the news from their local stormwater manager in March that a levy on the west side of town had been intentionally breached, prompting calls to evacuate.

As communities like Allensworth brace for the snowmelt this spring—and the floods they know are coming—this history of water theft, sabotage, and discrimination is always in the backs of their minds. 

Although residents at that March meeting decided against blocking the railroad culverts, they haven’t stayed quiet. Allensworth’s community leaders have been calling every government official they can think of, trying to find someone who can help them. And in the past few weeks, Takoa and his family say some politicians and government agencies have started to respond.

CalFire’s emergency response team blocked the levee that was allegedly sabotaged, as well as other breaches, and saved the town from flooding. California Gov. Gavin Newsom visited the community in April and promised to send more resources. Allensworth residents are used to the system in this basin working against them, but they hope that’s finally changing. How state agencies act may be the only thing standing between Allensworth and catastrophic flooding.

“We need all the help we can get, from every agency, and every person that wants to help and believes in communities like ours,” Denise Kadara said.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced proudly in August that 100,000 people had applied for her state’s free college program, Michigan Reconnect.

The program, which covers community college tuition for Michigan residents age 25 or older to get them to go back to school, is “a game-changer,” Whitmer said, “not only for the people enrolled in the program, but also for their families, small businesses and the state.”

More than 24,000 of those applicants have enrolled in the program, and 2,000 have completed a degree or a certificate, the state’s Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity says. It’s part of a wave of 32 such “free college” programs nationwide, according to the Campaign for Free College Tuition — a third of them added in the last five years.

But there’s a hitch. Most statewide programs, including Michigan’s, don’t necessarily help the lowest-income students finish or pay for college.

Many cover only the tuition that is still outstanding after federal aid is used up. These are called “last-dollar” free college programs. Since federal aid to the lowest-income students — usually in the form of Pell Grants — almost always covers the full cost of community college tuition, low-income students don’t benefit, while higher-income students do.

Despite a perception that free college programs are meant for lower-income students, “the only students who would qualify are students who aren’t eligible for Pell — wealthier students,” said Wil Del Pilar, vice president of higher education policy at the Education Trust. “These become messaging bills a lot of the time,” he said of the preponderance of free college legislation.

What low-income students really need is help with other expenses, such as housing, books and transportation — things free college programs don’t often cover. Those essentials account for about 80 percent of the cost of attending community college, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Free college often is “a false promise,” Del Pilar said. “I don’t think equity is at the heart of these programs, because if it was, they would be designed a bit differently than what we see.”

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Now a handful of states are trying something different. They’re launching “first-dollar” programs, in which money from the state can be applied first to tuition. That means low-income students can use their Pell Grants and other federal aid for all those other costs of college.

This can be a hard sell to legislators, since not all politicians think taxpayers should be on the hook for students’ room and board. Some researchers, including those at the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, estimate that these first-dollar programs can be at least  twice as expensive to implement as last-dollar ones.

“All things being equal we prefer first-dollar programs” said Ryan Morgan, chief executive of the Campaign for Free College Tuition. But it can be tough to win bipartisan support. “There are political realities to paying for students’ meals and housing.”

Some states are trying to do it anyway. New Mexico in the fall launched its Opportunity Scholarship, one of the most generous such programs in the country. It covers full tuition at two- and four-year public colleges and universities, before — instead of after — federal aid kicks in. (The state uses the term “middle-dollar” to describe its scholarship because other state money is applied first.)

The Opportunity Scholarship will cost more than $100 million to operate this year, said Stephanie Rodriguez, secretary of the New Mexico Department of Higher Education, and the governor’s office asked for more than $157 million to cover it next year. Part of that increase is because it’s been so popular, helping boost enrollment at New Mexico public universities and colleges by 4 percent in the last year. Some 34,000 students received the scholarship this fall.

But Rodriguez said the investment is worth it.

“What the benefit will be over time is a high return on investment with individuals staying in New Mexico, working in our workforce and having those family-sustaining wages that will keep New Mexico running over time,” Rodriguez said.

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The design of the program means that students can stack federal financial aid on top of Opportunity scholarships to cover basic needs beyond tuition. Rodriguez said there’s evidence that students are indeed using the scholarships in that way. First-year students including those who get the scholarship also received Pell Grants and other federal aid, she said her department found.

At Eastern New Mexico University, about 30 percent of students at the main campus receive Opportunity scholarships, and others receive separate state aid to help them cover their tuition, said President James Johnston. Enrollment grew nearly 7 percent this fall from the last academic year, Johnston said.

Some states with the more common and less generous last-dollar programs are experimenting with giving students who already used their Pell Grants to cover tuition an additional award to help them pay for books and other necessities. Oregon, for example, provides a minimum award of $2,000 to eligible students.

Some experts say that even when free college programs bring no real financial benefit to the lowest-income students, they can still have a positive impact. They can motivate students to look into and eventually pursue a higher education, whether or not they actually end up making any difference in the price. The word “free” is a powerful motivator, advocates say.

“There’s a lot of confusion and uncertainty and lack of transparency around college prices,” said Michelle Miller-Adams, a senior researcher for the Upjohn Institute who studies free college programs. “The benefit of these last-dollar community college programs has more to do with the messaging and the signaling that higher ed is affordable than it does with actually new financial resources.”

The less expensive last-dollar programs also can be more politically viable and likely to win bipartisan support. And they help many middle-income students who find paying for college difficult and might not qualify for other kinds of help.

Related: What’s a college degree worth? States start to demand that colleges share the data.

“There are people right above the Pell cutoff who don’t have access to federal financial aid, but also don’t have a lot of money,” Miller-Adams said. “Making college tuition-free for them is a big deal and great.”

How well a program works and how equitable it is also depends on whether it’s easy to understand. Some have potentially burdensome eligibility requirements, such as cutoffs based on grade-point averages or a requirement that recipients stay in the state for a certain period of time after graduating.

In many state legislatures, the rhetoric around free college has been more about producing workers with the skills employers need than helping the most marginalized students.

That’s the case in Michigan, where Whitmer is now hoping to expand her signature Michigan Reconnect program.

Ryan Fewins-Bliss, executive director of the Michigan College Access Network, said that while first-dollar programs are generally better for students, the last-dollar approach allows Michigan to spread money to more people.

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Just a few years ago, the state was near the bottom of the list in terms of money spent on financial aid, Fewins-Bliss said. Now it’s spending millions. With that increase, it’s hard to complain about the details.

“People have lost faith in their government and institutions. We need to renew that by investing in people,” he said. “And there’s no better way to change someone’s life than getting them more education.”

This story about free college programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

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