The dream that haunts Christine White is always the same, and though it comes less frequently, it isn’t any less terrifying. 

The black water comes rushing at the witching hour, barrelling toward her front door in Lost Creek, Kentucky. She’s outside, getting her grandson’s toys out of the yard. It hits her in the neck and knocks her off her feet before racing down a street that has become a vengeful river. She and her husband run to a hillside and scramble upward, grabbing hold of tree roots and branches. She finds her neighbors huddled at the top of the hill. As dawn comes, everything is unrecognizable, the land shifted, houses torn from foundations. They begin to walk through the trees, over the strip mine, out of the forest, in their pajamas and underwear with whatever they were able to carry when they fled. 

Then she wakes up.

That night used to replay every time White went to sleep. She started taking antidepressants six months ago, something she felt ashamed of at first but doesn’t anymore. They’ve helped a little, but the dream still haunts her, lightning-seared and vivid. 

It’s been one year since catastrophic floods devastated eastern Kentucky, taking White’s home and 9,000 or so others with it. Her current abode — a camper on a cousin’s land — has become, if not home, no longer strange. But it’s the closest thing to home she’ll get till her new house, in another county, is finished. Lost Creek, though, is all but gone forever. What houses remain are empty husks. Some are nothing more than foundations overgrown with grass. 

White is never going back. “All the land is gone,” she said.

In the early hours of July 28, 2022, creeks and rivers across 13 counties in eastern Kentucky overran their banks, filled by a month’s worth of rain that fell in a matter of days The water crested 14 feet above flood stage in some places, shattering records. All told, 44 people died and some 22,000 people saw their homes damaged —staggering figures in a region where some counties have fewer than 20,000 residents. Officially, the inundation destroyed nearly 600 homes and severely damaged 6,000 more. A lot of folks say that tally is low, based on the number of residents who sought help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. As of March about 8,000 applications for housing assistance had been approved. That’s half the number the agency received. 

The need for help, specifically housing assistance, was, and remains, acute. Most people here live on less than $30,000 a year, and at the time of the disaster, no more than 5 percent had flood insurance. Multitudes of nonprofits, church and community organizations, businesses, and government agencies have spent months pitching in as best they can. Yet there is a feeling among the survivors that no one’s at the rudder, and it’s everyone for themselves.

President Biden issued a federal disaster declaration the day after the flood, and his administration has disbursed nearly $300 million in aid so far. The state pitched in, too, housing 360 families in trailers parked alongside those from FEMA. Many of those have moved on to more permanent housing, but up to 1,800 are still awaiting a solution.

Some in the floodplains are taking buyouts — selling their homes to the federal government, which will essentially make the land a permanent greenspace. It’s a form of managed retreat, a ceding of the terrain to a changing climate. Some local officials openly worry that the approach doesn’t solve the biggest problem everyone faces: figuring out where on Earth people are going to live now. Eastern Kentucky was grappling with a critical shortage of housing even before the flood, and much of the land available for construction lies in flood-prone river bottoms. That has people looking toward the mountaintops leveled by strip mining.

Kate Clemons, who runs a nonprofit meal service called Roscoe’s Daughter, sees this crisis every day. As the water receded, she started serving hot meals in the town of Hindman a few nights each week, on her own dime. She figured it would be a months’ work. She’s still feeding as many as 700 hungry people every week. Recently, an apartment building in Hazard burned down, displacing nearly 40 people. Some of them were flood survivors. They’ve joined the others she’s taken to helping find homes.

“There’s no housing available for them,” she said.

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Clemons often brings food to Sasha Gibson, who after the flood moved with her boyfriend and nine children into two campers at Mine Made Adventure Park in Knott County. At first, she felt optimistic. “I was hoping that this would open up a new door to something better,” she said, after asking her children to go to the other trailer so she could sit for the interview in her cramped quarters. “Like this is supposed to be a new chapter in our lives.”

But the park, built on what was once a strip mine, became purgatory instead. 

Gibson, who lived on family land before the rains came, wants to leave. It’s just that the way out isn’t apparent yet. Many rentals won’t take so big a family. It doesn’t help that many of their identity documents were lost to the flood, making the search that much harder. She got some help from FEMA, but said the money went too quickly. 

A caseworker helps navigate a labyrinth of agencies designed to help Kentucky flood victims, and they’ve put in applications at a grab bag of charities building housing. One has told Gibson her case looks promising, but she’s still waiting to hear a final word. Other applications are so long and such a crapshoot — one ran 40 pages, for a loan she’d struggle to pay back — that she’s too tired to put them together.

“It’s a big what-if game,” she said. “They’re not reaching out to you. You’re expected to call them.”

Meanwhile, ATV riders sometimes ride through to the park, kicking up dust and leaving a mess in the restrooms. Gibson tries not to resent them. It’s not their fault she’s stuck.

“While it’s great and, like, they’re having a good time, it’s not a great time for us because we feel like we’re stuck here and we’re, like, an inconvenience and we’re in the way,” she said. “We don’t want to bother anybody.”

As extreme weather intensifies due to climate change, stories like Gibson’s will play out in more and more communities. Though eastern Kentucky hadn’t flooded like this since 1957, parts of the state could face 100-year floods every 25 years or so. About half of all homes in the region hit hardest by last year’s floods — Knott, Letcher, Perry, and Breathitt counties — are at risk for extreme flooding. 

Some residents worry that the legacies of surface mining – lost topsoil and tree cover, a ruined water table, and waste retention dams like the one that may have failed near Lost Creek, drowning it – will make communities more vulnerable to floods, compounding the effects of generational poverty and aging rural infrastructure. Housing needs to be built, and some say it needs to go up on the only high, flat land available — that is, the very same strip mines that contributed mightily to this whole problem in the first place.

High ground, especially former strip mines, in the region tends to be off limits. A study completed in the 1970s showed that most of what is available belongs to land companies, coal companies, and other private interests. About 1.5 million acres is believed to have been mined. Many of those sites are too remote to be of much use for housing, though, and those that are closer to town typically have seen commercial development. As the flood recovery has dragged on, though, some of these entities have decided to donate some of what they hold so that there might be more residential construction. Other parcels have been donated by landowning families with cozy relationships to the coal industry, though that hasn’t always gone smoothly.

Chris Doll is vice president of the Housing Development Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to building single-family homes for low-income families. It was beating the drum of eastern Kentucky’s crisis long before the flood. The situation is even more dire now. Without an influx of new construction, he argues, the local economy will spiral even further.  

On an overcast and gentle day in June, Doll walked around a former strip mine turned planned development in Knott County called Chestnut Ridge. It sits near a four-lane highway and close to other communities, with ready access to water lines. The Alliance is working with other nonprofits to build around 50 houses here, along with, it hopes, 50 to 150 more on each of two similar sites in neighboring counties. A $13 million state flood relief fund has committed $1 million to the projects.  

The road leading to what could, in just a few years, be a bustling neighborhood opened up into a bafflingly flat landscape, almost like a wooded savanna. It was wide open to the sunshine, unlike the deep hollers and coves that characterize this part of eastern Kentucky. To an untrained eye, it appeared to be a healthy ecosystem. Look closer, though, and one sees the mix of vegetation coal companies use to restore the land: invasive autumn olive, scrubby pine trees, and tall grasses, planted mostly for erosion control.  

Still, it’s ideal land for housing, and most folks around here won’t mind the landscaping. Doll said the number of people who need help is overwhelming, and his team can’t help everybody. But they hope to build as many houses as they can.

“There are so many people that have so many needs that I am of the mindset that I will help the person in front of me,” Doll said. “And now we can turn them into homeowners. If that’s what they want.”

On a hillside overlooking another mine site, Doll and I walked up to the ridge to see if we could get a better view of the terrain. It is covered in a thicket of brush, too dense to see beyond. The path wound toward a small clearing, where worn headstones and stone angels sit undisturbed. Family cemeteries are protected from strip mining, and this one was clearly still cared for; the bouquets at the angels’ feet were fresh. The lifecycle of coal had come and made its mark and gone. 

“You can see where they cut out,” Doll said. “They just entirely destroyed that mountain. It’s such a wild thing to think that strip mine land is going to be part of the solution.” 

Doll thinks of it as a post-apocalyptic landscape, or maybe mid-apocalyptic, ripe for renewal, but still carrying the weight of its past. The land was gifted by people whose money was made from coal, after all.

“And, you know, it’s great that they’re giving land back,” he said. “I would prefer if it was still mountains, but if it was mountains, we couldn’t build houses on it. So yeah, it’s ridiculously complex.” He shrugged.  “Bigger heads than mine.”

He squelched across the mud and back to the car. In the summer heat, two turkeys retreated into the shade of a scrubby pine grove, their tracks etched in the mud alongside hoofprints, probably from deer and elk. The place was alive, if not exactly the way it was before.  

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The former strip mine developments are financed in part by the Team Kentucky flood relief fund created by the governor’s office. Beyond the four projects already in motion, eastern Kentucky housing nonprofits like the Housing Development Alliance are working with landowners, local officials and the governor to secure more land in hopes of building hundreds more homes. 

“Working together – and living for one another – we’ve weathered this devastating storm,” Governor Andy Beshear said last week during a press conference outlining progress made since the flood. “Now, a year later, we see the promise of a brighter future, one with safer homes and communities as well as new investments and opportunities.”

That said, nothing is fully promised just yet, and the process could take years. The homes will be owner-occupied and residents will carry a mortgage, but housing advocates hope to lower as many barriers to ownership as possible and help families with grants and loans. Applications for the developments are expected to open within a couple of months. The plans, thus far, call for an “Appalachian look and feel” that combines an old-style coal camp town and a suburban subdivision to create single-family homes clustered in wooded hollers. Though some might argue that density should be the priority, local housing nonprofits want developments that feel like home to people used to having a bit of land for themselves. 

The Housing Development Alliance has built houses on mined land before, and some of them are among those given to 12 flood survivors thus far. Alongside other entities, it has also spent the year mucking, gutting, and repairing salvageable homes, often upgrading them with flood-safe building protocols.  Even that comparatively small number was made possible through support from a hodgepodge of local and regional nonprofits, and the labor of the Alliance’s carpenters has been supplanted with volunteer help. 

Though the Knott County Sportsplex, a recreation center built on the mineland next to Chestnut Ridge, appears to be sinking and cracking a bit, Doll said houses are too light to cause that kind of trouble.  Nonetheless, geotechnical engineers from the University of Kentucky, he said, are studying the land to make sure there won’t be any unpleasant surprises. The plan is for the neighborhoods to be mapped out onto the landscape with roads and sewer lines and streetlights, all of which require the involvement of myriad county departments and private companies; then the Alliance and its partners will come in and do what they do best, ideally as further disaster funding comes down the line. 

Still, all involved say that there’s no way they can build enough houses to fill the need.

More federal funding will arrive soon through the U.S. Housing and Urban Development disaster relief block grant program. It allocated $300 million to the region, and organizations like the Kentucky River Area Development District are gathering the information needed to prove to the feds the scale of the region’s need. Some housing advocates are critical of this process, though. 

Noah Patton, a senior policy analyst with the Low-Income Housing Coalition, said HUD grants are too unpredictable to forge long-term plans. “One reason it’s exceptionally complicated is because it is not permanently authorized,” he said. A president can declare a disaster and direct the agency to release funds, but Congress must approve the disbursement. Although it all went smoothly in Kentucky’s case, the unpredictability means there are no standing rules on how to allocate and spend funding.

“Oftentimes, you’re kind of starting from scratch every time there’s a disaster,” Patton said.  

Local development districts, such as the Kentucky River Area Development District, are holding meetings around the affected counties, urging people to fill out surveys so it can collect the data needed to apply for funding from the federal program. And HUD is overhauling its efforts to address criticism of unequal distribution of funds. Still, the people who might benefit from these block grants may not see the homes they’ll underwrite go up for a few more years, Patton said. 

On the state level, housing advocates have been pushing the legislature for more money to flow toward permanent housing. Many also say the combined state, FEMA and HUD assistance isn’t nearly enough. One analysis by Eric Dixon of the Ohio River Valley Institute, a nonprofit think tank, pegged the cost of a complete recovery at around $453 million for a “rebuild where we were” approach and more than $957 million to incorporate climate-resilient building techniques and, where necessary, move people to higher ground.

Sasha Gibson has heard rumors of the new developments. She’s somewhat interested insofar as they can get her out of limbo. Until she sees these houses going up, though, they’ll be just another vague promise in a year of vague promises that have gotten her nowhere but a dusty ATV park. It’s been, to put it bluntly, a terrible year, and the moments where the family’s had hope have only made the letdowns feel worse. 

 “I have no hope to rely on other people,”  she said. “I don’t want to give somebody else that much power over me. Because then you’ll just wind up disappointed and sad. And it’s even sadder when you have all of these little eyes looking at you.”

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As Gibson waits, others long ago decided to remain where they were and rebuild either because they could or because there wasn’t another choice. 

Tony Potter, who’s lived on family land in the city of Fleming-Neon since birth, has spent the past year in what amounts to a tool shed. It’s cramped and doesn’t even have a sink, but the land under it belongs to him, not a landlord or bank. It’s a piece of the world that he owns, and because a monthly disability check is his only income, he doesn’t have much else and probably couldn’t afford a mortgage or rent. Asked if he’d consider moving, he scoffed.

“You put yourself in my shoes,” he said. 

He can’t believe FEMA would offer to buy someone’s land, or that anyone would take the government up on the offer. “I mean, my God, why in the hell you wanna buy the property and then tell them they can’t live on it?” he said. “What kind of fool would sell their property? Why would you want to sell something and then go rent something?”

James Hall, who also lives in Neon, lost everything but is staying put, in part because he doesn’t think it’ll happen again. The words “thousand-year flood” must mean something, he said. But that didn’t keep him from putting his new trailer a foot and a half higher just in case. He might bump that up to 3 feet when he has a minute. Through it all, he’s kept his dry sense of humor. “If the flood comes again,” he said, “I’m gonna get me a houseboat.”

That kind of outlook buoys Ricky Burke, the town’s mayor. He said the community’s used to flooding – the city sits in a floodplain at the intersection of the Wrights Fork and Yonta Fork creeks – but last year’s was by far the worst. Water and mud plowed through town with enough force to shatter windows. People went without water and electricity for months in some places. A few buildings, like the burger drive-in on the corner at the edge of town, have been repaired, but others remain gaunt and empty. 

Still, Burke, a diesel mechanic who was elected in November, is confident the town will pick itself up. He’s heard talk that Neon might need to move some of its buildings, that a return to form simply isn’t viable. He’s dismissive of such a notion. What Neon needs, he believes, is a big party, and he’s planning to celebrate the community’s resilience with flowers, music, and a gathering on the anniversary of the flood.

“These people in Neon ain’t going nowhere,” he said.

Some folks, through persistence, hard work, and a bit of luck, have moved into new homes.

Linda and Danny Smith got theirs from Christian Aid Ministries, a Mennonite disaster relief group, though construction started a couple months later than planned because it ended up taking awhile to figure out exactly where the floodplain was. It was built on their land at the end of a Knott County road called, whimsically, Star Wars Way. According to the Smiths, the group, which was from out of state, nearly ran out of time before having to return home and only just finished the job before leaving. They left so quickly that Danny Smith said he still needed to paint the doors. He isn’t complaining, though. Other homes were left half-done, their new owners left searching high and low for someone to finish the job. 

Although grateful for the help that put a roof over his head, Smith got a little tired of dealing with all the people who came to heal his body, his spirit, and his mind even as he completed mounds of paperwork and made calls to anyone he thought might help. “One guy, he kept insisting that I needed to go talk to someone,” he recalled. “And I said ‘who?’”

The man suggested that Danny talk to a therapist. He laughed at the recollection. It was a laugh heard often around here, the sound of a tired survivor who’s already assessed their own hierarchy of needs many times over. “I said, ‘You know, I don’t need nothing done with my mind. I need a home.”

Despite the frustration, the Smiths are piecing their lives back together, a little bit higher up off the ground than they were before. Christine White is praying for a similar outcome, and thinks she can finally see it on the horizon. The occasional nightmare aside, she’s felt pretty good these days.

FEMA gave her $1,900 awhile back to demolish her house and closed her case, leaving her high and dry. She called housing organization after housing organization until CORE, a national nonprofit that assists underserved communities, agreed to build a small home on a piece of land she owns in Floyd County. Construction began earlier this month. White, who spends her time volunteering at a local food bank, calls it a miracle. “You just gotta go where the Lord leads you,” she says. But it’s not built yet, so she’s trying not to count her chickens.

Parker Hobson contributed to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Old nightmares and new dreams mark the year since Kentucky’s devastating flood on Jul 27, 2023.

A federal judge in May dismissed the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe’s lawsuit against the state over the collection of an online sales tax after the state informed the tribe of the existing tax reimbursement process.

Filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle in December, the tribe argued tribal members should be exempt from the collection of 6.5 percent sales tax in online purchases, in addition to exemptions for in-person purchases on the reservation.

In June, Jack Fiander, the tribe’s general counsel, said the lawsuit was rendered “unnecessary” upon further investigation. There is an existing process for reimbursement from the state, and tribal members can notify online retailers of their tribal status before the payment is made and have the tax removed.

“The process already existed, but it seems to me ideally it should have been on the state to send out a notice to various online retailers that tribes at these locations are tax exempt,” Fiander said.

The federal law exempting enrolled tribal citizens from paying sales tax states the goods are exempt if “delivered to or the sale is made in the tribe or enrolled tribal member’s Indian country.”

Fiander argued that those requirements created an unnecessary hardship due to the remoteness of the 315-citizen tribe.

Located 30 miles up Highway 530, the reservation is near only a handful of brick-and-mortar retailers. The closest town is Darrington with a population of 1,400. Forcing members to pay for a 100-mile round trip delivery of an item from Seattle, Fiander explained, was not worth the tax exemption.

The suit also alleged the sales tax was a form of discrimination against the tribe. Tribal Council Chairman Nino Maltos Jr. called the tax exemption a sovereignty issue.

But in February, John Ryser, then-acting director of the state Department of Revenue, filed a motion to dismiss the case.

In an 18-page document, Ryser argued the tribe failed to state a claim for which relief can be granted. The motion also outlined the mechanism already available to refund the sales tax and explained how to work directly with online vendors to remove the tax preemptively.

Ryser’s motion to dismiss argued the “Tribe has failed to allege facts or law that support a preemption claim for declaratory or injunctive relief.” Ryser’s motion also stated the tribe’s allegations are “insufficient” to show intentional discrimination based on race, as the lawsuit alleged.

In May, U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo S. Martinez tossed the case, stating the tribe failed to properly state a claim.

With the case dismissed, Fiander said the tribe plans to “work directly with online vendors” in the future.

“The problem with the refund policy is you have to wait,” Fiander said. “The easiest way to (remove the sales tax) will be between the consumer and retailer — to contact the internet seller and provide them proper documentation and tribal ID.”

A spokesperson for the state Department of Revenue told the Herald that the department “appreciates the court’s decision and is awaiting further developments, if any, in the case.”

Kayla J. Dunn: 425-339-3449; kayla.dunn@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @KaylaJ_Dunn.

This article was published via AP Storyshare. 

The post Judge dismisses suit over sales tax, tribe agrees appeared first on Buffalo’s Fire.

Civic Leadership & Engagement Corps (CLEC) has awarded Saint Martin’s University a $125,000 career and leadership development grant. CLEC is an AmeriCorps initiative through the

Ever since Democrat Janet Mills was elected governor of Maine in 2018, she has been a strong advocate for renewable energy in general and wind energy in particular. The state has tremendous potential for wind production, given the high wind velocities off its coast, and it has committed to procuring 100 percent of its energy from clean sources by 2050. Earlier this year, in an attempt to supercharge wind energy production in the state, Mills proposed legislation to speed up permitting for wind ports, sites where wind turbines could be built before being deployed offshore.

That bill got the votes needed to pass in the state legislature — only to be vetoed by Mills herself earlier this week. At issue are amendments to the bill made in the state senate, which require the undertaking to incorporate Project Labor Agreements, or PLAs, a type of collective bargaining agreement in the construction industry that streamlines work on projects and establishes standards for wages and working conditions — standards that are typically more robust than those that would prevail in their absence. 

In a letter vetoing the bill, the governor said the provision would have a “chilling effect” on companies that are non-unionized, raise construction costs for the wind port which would eventually be borne by Maine taxpayers, and lead to out-of-state workers being bussed to Maine. The idea is that the PLAs will lead to fewer firms pursuing contracts for work on the wind project — or firms will increase costs to meet the PLA requirements — leading to a higher overall price tag and less employment for local residents. (Only 10 percent of construction workers in Maine are in a union.)

“We must maximize, not sideline or limit, benefits to Maine workers and companies and minimize costs to Maine taxpayers and ratepayers,” Mills wrote. “It is imperative that investment in offshore wind facilities foster opportunities for Maine’s workforce and construction companies to compete on a level playing field for this work.”

The veto does not appear to be the end of the road for the legislation. In the letter, Mills emphasized that her office is willing to work with lawmakers, and the Maine Senate is expected to reconvene next week. Environmental and labor advocates told Grist that a number of legislative pathways to pass the bill still remain open, and that Mills’ office is actively involved in negotiations with lawmakers. 

“The veto is not unexpected and not the end of the story,” said Kathleen Meil, senior director of policy and partnerships with the environmental group Maine Conservation Voters.

Still, Mills’ veto of a bill she herself proposed is an example of the tensions that can emerge between climate and labor priorities. Labor unions in Maine have been a strong proponent of wind energy investments in the state. The industry is expected to generate thousands of jobs, and unions in the state have argued that PLAs are a critical mechanism to ensure that those jobs pay well and adequately protect workers. 

Arguments that PLAs raise construction costs and would make Maine uncompetitive are unfounded, according to Francis Eanes, executive director of the Maine Labor Climate Council, a coalition of a dozen unions across the state. “These are routinely used tools across the construction industry writ large, and it’s the case in the offshore wind industry,” he said. 

Indeed, researchers have found that projects with PLA requirements attract a similar number of bidders as those without PLA requirements and do not result in higher costs. One study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, evaluated PLA and non-PLA projects at community colleges in California and found that PLA projects actually had a slightly higher number of bidders — and similar costs — compared to non-PLA projects. Another study that evaluated school projects in New England found no evidence that PLAs raised or lowered costs. 

The Maine government also has recent experience with PLAs in which Mills’ fears appear not to have borne out. A law passed two years ago authorizing construction of an offshore wind research array included a PLA provision, as did a law providing $20 million for building affordable housing in the state. In the case of the latter, the Maine State Housing Authority, which was in charge of disbursing the funds, received requests for double the amount of funding available from builders. 

“When we hear ‘the sky is going to fall,’ that’s a useful talking point from construction firms and other players in the industry who are not interested in sharing power,” said Eanes. 

Mills’ veto came a day after the Associated General Contractors of Maine, a group representing several construction firms in the state, sent a letter urging her to veto the bill. The letter warned that PLA provisions in the bill would lead to higher costs for energy consumers and “create an unfair advantage for out-of-state skilled workers.”

A compromise may still be possible in the coming weeks. Lawmakers have floated language that would prioritize workers from Maine in order to allay Mills’ concerns that the inclusion of a PLA provision would lead to workers being bussed in from out of state. Legislators have also suggested including provisions that emphasize that all contractors will be eligible to work with the state, regardless of whether or not their workers are unionized. 

“We spent months building a really delicate coalition, not just with labor and environmental and faith community groups, but with fishing communities as well,” said Eanes. “We see lots of upside to finding a resolution with the governor that can get past the ideological opposition, recognize that this is how it’s been done everywhere else, and seize this amazing opportunity for Maine to build an industry that could be a once-in-a-generation game changer.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why Maine’s climate-conscious governor vetoed an offshore wind bill on Jun 29, 2023.

Between 2015 and 2020, Indigenous and Afro-descendant Peoples, and small, local communities in Asia, Africa and Latin America, gained legal recognition to more than 247 million acres of land – an 85 percent increase. That’s according to a new report from Rights and Resources Initiative, a global non-profit focused on land and resource rights.

Researchers covered 73 countries and found that rights holders now hold title to more than 11 percent of the Earth’s land – a combined area larger than Egypt. However, in 49 of the countries studied, more than 3-million acres of Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local lands have not been recognized by governments. That means communities have limited rights of access and have no rights to manage or prevent third parties from entering their lands. In some cases, lack of documentation in land claims can leave communities vulnerable to inconsistent and violent expulsion policies by local officials, making it difficult to reach resolutions, due process, or receive just compensation for oppressive tactics carried out by governments, companies, or individuals.

Multiple studies have shown that Indigenous peoples are some of the best managers and protectors of the environment and that rights-based approaches could be critical to curbing the effects of climate change.

“There’s a need for donors to invest in funding advocacy for legal commissions and directly supporting communities so they can secure their rights,” said Solange Bandiaky-Badji, coordinator of Rights and Resources Initiative. “But governments need to put in implementation and regulation mechanisms so we can increase the number of areas under the ownership of local communities and Indigenous peoples.”

According to the report, Sub-Saharan Africa saw the biggest increase in legal recognition of community land rights, gaining nearly 87-million acres, and largely driven by efforts in Kenya and Liberia to recognize communities’ customary land. In 2016 Kenya’s government implemented the Community Land Act which led to engaging with government and rights holders’ to figure out the best way to implement the “progressive provisions of the recognition of the rights on the ground,” said Bandiaky-Badji. Liberia passed the Land Rights Act in 2018, which recognised traditional lands and launched a land process to partner with local community organizations and networks to recognize customary land rights. 

According to researchers, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is a country to watch, after passing a historic law recognizing the rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2022.

”The DRC has been going through major reform processes,” said Bandiaky-Badji. “The Indigenous Pygmy law that was adopted less than two years ago was a real milestone because it allows Indigenous people to claim their collective rights. It’s helping grow and implement the demarcating of the land of Indigenous peoples.” 

In 2020 the Republic of Congo passed a historic law which introduces new concepts like certification, verification of legality, consideration of riverside communities, deforestation and reforestation, carbon credits and the fight against climate change. In tandem, the study contends that both countries have an opportunity to accelerate land rights recognition in the Congo Basin in the years to come.

Asia is home to an estimated 70 percent  of the world’s Indigenous population and nearly 22 percent of land is owned by communities. Of the countries analyzed in South and Southeast Asia, over 44 million acres are designated for, or owned by, Indigenous peoples and local communities. The report found that compared to the data collected in 2015, community land recognition increased 18 times in India and nearly seven times in Indonesia over five years. However, scientists noted only Cambodia, India, Indonesia and the Philippines, have national, legal frameworks recognizing community-based ownership. In China, collective ownership of forestland and an extensive pasture contract system cover nearly half the country’s land area. If China were not included in the study, Asia would have the lowest percentage of community ownership of any region, at only 0.8 percent.

“There’s still a lot that needs to be done, it’s insufficient really. It’s really important to look into countries where there are still gaps of recognizing the rights of communities,” said Bandiaky-Badj. “We want to recognize the rights of Indigenous people, local communities and the rights of women. We need to push for more recognition of land rights.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline More Indigenous and local communities are getting land back on Jun 27, 2023.

An estimated 2.4 million people work on farms in the United States. Though their work is critical to agriculture and the economy alike, pesticide exposure continues to be a major occupational risk—and the effects ripple out into society and the food we eat.

Pesticides can easily drift onto farmworkers—and the schools and neighborhoods near fields. Current pesticide regulations aren’t consistently enforced, and vulnerable workers aren’t always able to seek help when there are violations. 

Exposures may continue around the clock, especially on farms where workers and their families live, says Olivia Guarna, lead author of a recent report, “Exposed and at Risk: Opportunities to Strengthen Enforcement of Pesticide Regulations for Farmworker Safety,” by the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law and Graduate School, in partnership with the nonprofit advocacy group Farmworker Justice. This is one of a series of reports addressing needed policy reforms and federal oversight of programs impacting farmworkers. 

Alongside faculty and staff in the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems, Guarna, a honors summer intern with a background in environmental issues, spent 10 weeks interviewing attorneys, officials, administrators, legal advisors, and farmworker advocates, researching how pesticide use is regulated and enforced in Washington, California, Illinois, and Florida. What Guarna didn’t expect was just how complicated the regulatory scheme is. The federal Environmental Protection Agency technically has oversight over pesticide use, yet in practice receives little data from states, whose enforcement is spotty at best. “There are a lot more protections on paper than I think are actually being implemented to protect farmworkers,” she says.

One of the biggest issues, according to Laurie Beyranevand, Director of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems and one of the authors of the report, is that unlike other environmental laws administered by the EPA, the agency doesn’t adequately gather data from the states, making enforcement of existing standards more difficult. 

In Florida, the report found, inspections are virtually never a surprise. “Farmworkers report that when inspectors come to the farms, growers know they are coming, and they get to prepare,” says Mayra Reiter, project director of occupational safety and health for Farmworker Justice. “Inspectors don’t get to see what goes on day-to-day in those workplaces.”

Washington is considered one of the more progressive states in terms of farmworker protections. Yet between 2015 and 2019, Guarna discovered the average violation rate there was 418%, meaning that multiple violations were found on every inspection performed. 

In California, when violations are found, fines are often not levied, the report concluded. Even when penalties are issued, they’re often for amounts like $250 — token fines that growers consider to be part of the cost of doing business. Only a single case reported in California between 2019 and 2021 involved a grower being fined the more significant sum of $12,000.

Still, California is one of the few states that makes information readily available to the public about what chemicals are being applied where. Elsewhere, it’s virtually unknown. Washington, Florida, and Illinois do not require pesticide use reporting at all. 

“You have the farmworkers being directly exposed, and there’s so little transparency on what’s in our food,” Guarna says. “It’s not just farmworkers who are affected — drift is a big problem when it’s close to schools and neighborhoods. There’s just so little we know. A lot of the health effects happen years down the road.

In some instances, toxic exposure has become quickly and tragically evident when babies are born with birth defects. Within a span of seven weeks in 2004 and 2005, for example, three pregnant farmworkers who worked for the same tomato grower, Ag-Mart, in North Carolina and Florida, gave birth to babies with serious birth defects, like being born without arms or legs. Florida’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services issued two complaints against Ag-Mart in 2005, alleging 88 separate violations of pesticide use laws altogether. Ultimately, 75 of those violations were dismissed. Ag-Mart was fined a total of $11,400.

Yet thousands of poisonings continue to happen each year, Farmworker Justice says. In August 2019, for example, a field of farmworkers in central Illinois was sprayed with pesticides when the plane of a neighboring pesticide applicator flew directly overhead, the report noted. Several workers turned up at local emergency rooms with symptoms of chemical exposure. 

Despite these incidents, Illinois does not mandate that medical providers report suspected cases of exposure. Only because a medical provider at the hospital personally knew someone in the local public health department—who in turn contacted connections at the Illinois Migrant Council and Legal Aid Chicago—did the exposure result in legal action.

Workers often live on the farms where they work, exposing them to chemicals virtually round-the-clock, Reiter adds. “We know from farmworker testimonies that when they return to their homes, they can smell the pesticides, and it lingers for days after they return,” she says.

Vulnerable legal status can make it difficult for farmworkers to report exposures. Millions of farmworkers hail from Mexico, Guatemala, and elsewhere in Central America, according to Farmworker Justice, although significant numbers also come from countries like Jamaica and South Africa. An estimated half of farmworkers in the U.S. are undocumented. 

Millions of others come on H2-A guest-worker visas that allow them to come to the country for seasonal jobs of up to 10 months. These temporary visas are tied to specific employers, so workers fear being deported or otherwise retaliated against if they raise complaints about safety violations.

“Because [workers] are looked at as expendable, they’re regularly exposed to neurotoxic pesticides that can be carried into their home settings,” says agricultural policy expert Robert Martin, who recently retired from John Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. “They’re largely immigrants, and they don’t have a lot of legal protections. The advocates they do have, like Farmworker Justice, are terrific, but they’re really taken advantage of by the system because of their legal status.”

Inherent conflicts of interest also present legal loopholes. The state agencies charged with enforcing federal and state pesticide safety laws, like state Departments of Agriculture, are often the same agencies that promote the economic interests of the ag industry. And farmworkers know it. “That sort of cultural conflict is a big issue,” Guarna says. “Farmworkers have become deeply skeptical of departments of agriculture, and skeptical that they have farmworkers’ interests at heart. They fear their complaints are going to fall on deaf ears.”

While the EPA is legally required to maintain oversight over state agencies, in practice, they only require states to report about federally funded work—and the vast majority of state programs are funded by state budgets. Mandatory and universal standards for inspections and responses to violations would help tremendously, the report concludes. “One of our recommendations is that there should be whole-of-program reporting where states, tribes, and territories have to report all their activities,” Guarna says. “There are some very discrete fixes that can be made that would have a huge impact, so I am hopeful about that.”

Among the report’s 17 policy recommendations is to ensure that enforcement of pesticide safety gets delegated to an agency that is specifically tasked with protecting the health of workers. This could include transferring enforcement to state departments of labor or health, or even creating a new authority specifically dedicated to pesticide regulation.

“Exposed and At Risk” follows a previous report from the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems that focused on the two major threats facing farmworkers—heat stress and pesticide exposure. It focused on opportunities for states to take action to better protect farmworkers, and was written in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. That collaboration also led to a third report, called “Essential and in Crisis: A Review of the Public Health Threats Facing Farmworkers in the U.S.,” which recently explored the public health and environmental impacts of industrial agriculture. Martin, who co-authored these findings, explains that the concentrated power and wealth of large agribusiness companies has consequences for both worker safety and the environment. 

Following corporate consolidation since the 1980s, “there are fewer meat, seed, pesticide companies, and their combined economic power really keeps the status quo in place,” Martin says. ”There are some pretty direct public health threats of these operations.”

As “Exposed and at Risk,” notes, the regulatory system should be structured in a way that works to protect farmworkers. But currently, federal regulators lack sufficient data to even identify the tremendous gaps in enforcement. Requiring states to develop comprehensive reporting systems would be a small step toward protecting the foundation of American agriculture.

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Vermont Law and Graduate School, a private, independent institution, is home to a Law School that offers both residential and online hybrid JD programs and a Graduate School that offers master’s degrees and certificates in multiple disciplines, including programs offered by the School for the Environment, the Center for Justice Reform, and other graduate-level programs emphasizing the intersection of environmental justice, social justice and public policy. Both the Law and Graduate Schools strongly feature experiential clinical and field work learning. For more information, visit vermontlaw.edu, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The legal loopholes that threaten farmworkers’ health and safety on Jun 20, 2023.

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 want to see the Colorado River change in real time, head to Lake Powell.

At the nation’s second-largest reservoir, water levels recently dipped to the lowest they’ve been since 1968. As the water recedes, a breathtaking landscape of deep red-rock canyons that cradle lush ecosystems and otherworldly arches, caverns and waterfalls is emerging.

On a warm afternoon after the reservoir had dipped to a record low, Jack Stauss walked along a muddy creek bed at the bottom of one of those canyons. He works as the outreach coordinator for Glen Canyon Institute, a conservation nonprofit that campaigns for the draining of the reservoir and highlights the natural beauty of Glen Canyon, which was flooded in the 1960s to create Lake Powell.

“I call this the moon zone,” Stauss said, as his shin-high rubber boots splashed through cold pools and eddies. “There are ecosystems that thrive in these side canyons, even when they’ve been de-watered for just, like, four years. You start to see stuff come back on a really unprecedented scale.”

Lake Powell is already receiving a major springtime boost. Until July, snow from an epic winter in the Rocky Mountains will melt and flow into the reservoir, and portions of those side canyons will flood anew. But for a brief moment in the late winter and early spring of 2023, Powell was creeping lower by the day. The falling water levels have created a harrowing visual reminder. Climate change has put the West’s key water supply on the ropes. At the same time, the drop reveals a spectacular landscape that environmentalists have heralded as a “lost national park.”

Stauss – an environmentalist who refers to Lake Powell as “the reservoir” – invited a small group of adventurous water wonks to chronicle its historically low water levels. He ambles along through the ankle-deep water, pointing up toward the infamous “bathtub rings,” chalky white mineral deposits on the canyon walls that serve as visual markers of the reservoir’s heyday.

“It’s staggering,” Stauss said. “The scale is hard to wrap your head around. The fact that the whole time we were just hiking, we would have been underwater, is shocking.”

The high water line, set in the early 1980s, is more than 180 feet above our heads. Even last summer’s high water mark is about eye level.

Reminders of Glen Canyon’s return to some form of pre-reservoir normal aren’t always as static as the bathtub rings on canyon walls. All around our feet, the shallow water teems with life. The crystal-clear creeks are full of spindly bugs that float on the water’s surface. Occasionally, toads jump from the stream’s sandy banks. Lizards bask in patches of sun. Bird calls echo off the smooth walls and melt into a distorted chorus.

Teal Lehto, who makes short videos about the Colorado River on TikTok under the name “WesternWaterGirl,” was also on the expedition. She pushed past a dense thicket of willows as we hiked through the canyon.

“It’s really, really interesting seeing the way that the ecosystem is recovering,” Lehto said. “And then there’s a little bit of heartbreak knowing that this area is probably going to be submerged again in a couple of months.”

After spending decades under mostly-still water, these canyons are laden with heaps of sediment that settled onto on the lake’s floor. Towering, crumbly banks of sand and dirt line the bottom of each side canyon, often high enough that some of the group’s ski enthusiasts try to carve down, sliding across the loose deposits in their sandals.

As those sandy banks start to erode, they also reveal traces of human activity. Old beer cans, golf balls, and other tattered bits of unidentifiable trash poke through the sediment, leaving lasting reminders of Powell’s double-life: a bustling haven for recreation, and a key piece of water storage infrastructure.

‘Nature bats last’

The group’s boat – a rented pontoon boat with plenty of space for the camera gear, camping setups and loaded coolers we’ve piled towards the back – wasn’t particularly agile. Stauss carefully piloted the craft through a “ghost forest,” where the blackened, skeletal tips of cottonwood trees are just seeing the light of day after decades underwater.

“Every time you come down here, it’s sort of a different game of steering the boat through stuff,” he said. “It’s kind of exciting, actually, like a little puzzle.”

After a slow cruise around the eerie labyrinth of treetops, Stauss leaned the accelerator back into neutral. The boat idled in front of the messy, muddy delta of the Escalante River. The river carries snowmelt about 90 miles through Southeast Utah before it runs into Lake Powell, in an area which was once the free-flowing Colorado River.

Another member of the expedition, Len Necefer, was in this same spot last year. Necefer, a member of the Navajo Nation, founded the consulting and media group NativesOutdoors and holds a PhD in engineering and public policy.

“It’s constantly changing,” he said. “In a few weeks you’ll be able to motor around and go up to Willow Canyon and all that. But right now it’s in this sort of crazy zone of transition.”

The group ponders a trek out onto the delta itself but decides against venturing into the mud, where footing looks uncertain. As the boat cruised into a U-turn, Necefer posited that “nature bats last.”

“Bottom of the ninth, end of a baseball game, nature is at bat and basically has the final say on what happens,” he said.

Nature is taking its last licks in nearly every corner of the sprawling reservoir. Elsewhere, a natural stone arch, once completely submerged, is now so high above the water that you can drive a boat underneath.

At the reservoir’s marinas, receding water has thrown a curveball to Lake Powell’s powerhouse recreation industry. In 2019, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area attracted 4.4 million visitors, more than Yellowstone National Park. The National Park Service says tourism brought $502.7 million to local economies.

But the recreation area – a world-renowned hotspot for houseboaters, wakeboarders, and jet skiers – has taken a hit.

At marinas along Lake Powell, the distance between the parking lot and the shore of the reservoir has gotten dramatically longer over the past two decades.

At Bullfrog Marina, where Stauss rented the pontoon boat, what was once a gentle ramp right next to the parking lot is now a strip of concrete hundreds of feet long. Docks and buoys once moored in water dozens of feet deep now lie crooked and dusty on the desert ground.

In the past few years, the National Park Service has had to make the Bullfrog Marina ramp even longer, chasing the water as it recedes. Further upstream, the Hite Marina, once a busy put-in for boats, is stranded so far away from the water that it is now shuttered.

‘Speechless’ at the Cathedral

Each hike into a new side canyon was the same. Stauss pushed the bow of the pontoon boat into the muddy shore, and the group hopped out clad with backpacks full of cameras. At each new mooring, the path was only visible a few dozen yards up the canyon before a dramatic curve obscured the route ahead.

On one hike, an extra-squishy patch of mud turned out to be quicksand. The trekkers tap danced across it, careful not to sink too deep, but egged each other on to test its limits. Filmmaker Ben Masters, a member of the expedition, wriggled around until he was waist deep and needed a hand to get unstuck.

“Indiana Jones taught me to stop resisting,” Lehto said as Masters pulled himself out of the muck.

After about a half hour of strolling, the crew got what it came for – a rare glimpse of Cathedral in the Desert.

Awe-inspiring as they are, the side canyons can blur together after a few hours of plodding through relatively indistinct curves in the rock.

This one is different.

The hikers round a corner and come upon a red-rock cavern. The group, chatty on the way in, falls silent for a moment.

“I’m kind of speechless, which is really funny for me, because I always have something to say,” said Lehto, the TikTok creator. “But it is gorgeous. It’s amazing to me to imagine that this was all underwater, and it will be underwater again soon.”

The canyon tapered into a kind of dome, where only narrow slivers of sunlight peek through. In one corner, at the foot of a giant sand mound, a thin waterfall trickled from above. The rivulet snaked through a crack in the rock before it dribbled into a frigid, still pool and echoed through the cavern.

“I kind of wish there was a choir here because I think it would be really beautiful,” Lehto said. “Anybody know how to sing?”

Nobody in the group chimes in. Most are silent, staring up toward the top of the waterfall and contemplating the best way to position their cameras.

After a few minutes of silent marveling, Stauss provides some context.

Cathedral in the Desert made a brief above-water appearance in 2005, only to be submerged again until 2019. Since then, fluctuating water levels have flooded in and out of the pocket, limiting the waterfall’s height.

“People used to boat up 100 feet above the waterfall,” he said. “It’s something we’ve been waiting for for a long time. It’s another one of these markers of restoration to see Cathedral come back and to know that it’s not just a fraction of what it once was, but it’s going to be full size.”

After the fall, a rise

Standing under the Cathedral’s ceiling of smooth desert stone, Stauss pondered the future of a region where Lake Powell, and the rest of the Colorado River’s sprawling network of storage infrastructure, are due for an overhaul.

“I don’t think we should just think that the drawdown of these reservoirs is over,” he said. “I think we should use the moment to rethink completely how we store, use and conserve water across the West—and I think Glen Canyon should be at the heart of that conversation.”

In some circles, Glen Canyon is a major thread in conversations about water management. Environmentalists argue that Powell should be drained and Glen Canyon should be allowed to return completely. Recreators disagree, and water managers have shown reluctance to break so sharply from the status quo.

But the Colorado River’s rapid drying has pushed the idea of draining Lake Powell from the fringe and given a semblance of legitimacy to water management ideas once considered far-fetched. The river, which supplies tens of millions across the Southwest, has faced dry conditions since around 2000. The seven U.S. states which share its water have been caught in a standoff about how to cut back on demand.

This year, deep mountain snow promises a serious boost, the likes of which have only been seen a handful of times in the past two decades. Runoff is expected to raise the reservoir’s surface by about 50 to 90 feet by this July.

But even the most cautious runoff estimates would leave the reservoir less than 40 percent full. Its levels will again begin to drop over the fall and winter.

One year of strong snow won’t be nearly enough to pull the reservoir out of trouble. Climate scientists say the Colorado River would need five or six winters like this one to rescue its major reservoirs from the brink of crisis.

The past few springs delivered relatively low runoff, leading to summers fraught with mandatory water cutbacks and emergency releases from smaller reservoirs – efforts primarily focused on keeping water in Lake Powell.

Water managers are under pressure to keep water flowing through hydroelectric turbines within Glen Canyon Dam, which holds back Powell. After decades as a rock-solid emblem of the nation’s Cold War era expansion into the West, dropping water levels are threatening one of the dam’s primary functions. If water dips too low, the federal government could be forced to shut off hydropower generators that supply electricity to 5 million people across seven states.

This wet winter will ease some of that pressure, although water managers have publicly emphasized the need to avoid “squandering” the benefits of an unusually snowy year. The favorable conditions could relieve the need for emergency changes to Colorado River management, allowing the seven states which share its water to wait until 2026 for broader changes. The current operating guidelines for the river are set to expire that year, and water managers are expected to come up with more permanent cutbacks to water demand before that happens.

Amid tense negotiations and pre-2026 posturing, environmentalists like Stauss and his colleagues at Glen Canyon Institute are arguing for a future which cuts out a need for Lake Powell entirely – decommissioning Glen Canyon Dam and storing Powell’s water in other reservoirs.

In the meantime, Stauss relished the brief glimpse at what that might look like.

“It’s a scary future for water in the West,” he said. “But as far as Glen Canyon goes, it’s a pretty amazing silver lining.”

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC, and supported by the Walton Family Foundation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As the nation’s second-largest reservoir recedes, a once-drowned ecosystem emerges on Jun 3, 2023.