A shortage of quality housing and struggling downtowns were among the top challenges rural community members face, according to consultants who help small towns identify and solve problems.

Save Your Towns is an Oklahoma and Mississippi-based group co-founded by Becky McCray and Deb Brown. They work to educate people on low- or no-cost solutions to problems in small towns across the U.S. and elsewhere. 

Since 2015, the women have been surveying residents about their towns. Survey participation is voluntary and self-selected, not based on scientific polling methods, but the online survey does offer a range of responses from people who identify as rural.

This year’s survey found that in addition to housing and downtowns, other challenges were not enough volunteers, losing young people, and a lack of childcare. 

Brown said the top community assets are natural resources, outdoor recreation, tourism, committed people in a good workforce, effective leaders, and arts, culture, and events. 

“Having said all of that, there are some big disconnects,” she told the Daily Yonder. “We uncovered that between what rural people want and what services and assistance are commonly offered to them.”

Brown said business owners and leaders said usable buildings are harder to find than loans, and they showed little interest in needing support with business plans or pitch competitions. 

The survey was open from November 11, 2022, to January 31, 2023. A total of 315 responses were collected online from subscribers and visitors to SaveYour.Town and SmallBizSurvival.com, from media coverage and cooperating groups that publicized the survey.

Respondents self-identified themselves as rural, and 206 identified themselves as business owners. Participants included 295 from the United States, 11 from Canada, and six from Australia.

The self-selected participants were more optimistic about the economy than people who participated in the Daily Yonder’s 2022 scientific, randomized poll of rural voters.

In the Daily Yonder’s survey in October, nearly three quarters of rural respondents said the economy was not working well for them, and half said they expected their financial situation would get worse in the next year.

Poll director Celinda Lake said at the time that she was stunned by the depth of pessimism in the responses.

In the SaveYour.Town survey, nearly 40% of participants responded positively to the question, “Do you think your community will be better off in 10 years?”

“Rural people were twice as likely to say they were optimistic about their community’s future, as were negative about their community’s future,” she added. About half of respondents were neutral on the question.

“I was very happy to see how optimistic people were. And I think the thing that really surprised me, I was really pleased and surprised to see that events and arts and culture and education, and tourism were listed as one of the top community assets.”

McCray said the pair love to hear that people are using the survey results for educational purposes.

“We know it gets global attention,” McCray said. “Because what rural people say they need doesn’t always match the things that they’re offered, or the stories that we read, or the things that we hear on TV, or the reports, for example.”

The post Rural Communities Are Upbeat About the Future Despite Persisting Issues appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

A former distillery owner and church leader in Barre has apparently gone public as an online persona who espouses neo-Nazi ideas in a radical Lutheran fascist podcast.

After a group of anonymous anti-fascist researchers linked Ryan Woodie Dumperth to the online account “Treblewoe” late last month through a variety of online records, Treblewoe appeared to confirm the connection on June 1, posting pictures of Dumperth and referring to getting “doxed” on the pseudonymous account.

Digging deep into Treblewoe’s posts on Twitter, Gab and other social media websites, the researchers found details of the user’s personal history that matched Dumperth’s and linked the voices of the two to support their claims, among other evidence.

Dumperth, 46, did not respond to phone calls or emails last week and this week requesting comment. Online records indicate he still lives in Barre.

Dumperth founded Old Route Two Spirits, a Barre distillery that was purchased by Connecticut-based John Fitch Distilling Company in 2020. He also served as vice president of the Williamstown Lutheran Church, but left that post after an April 2022 election, according to the church’s current president.

Under the Twitter handle “Treblewoe,” the person who appears to be Dumperth disseminates a unique brand of Lutheran facism. He hosts a podcast, Stone Choir, with fellow Lutheran fascist Corey Mahler, the subject of a Rolling Stone exposé earlier this year. The story ran with the headline, “He Believes Hitler Went to Heaven — and Wants to Take Over the Lutheran Church.”

Online, Treblewoe’s hate runs the gamut of bigoted beliefs, from pseudoscientific race science and obsessions with patriarchal power structures to general conspiracies about a Jewish cabal running the world.

Alongside his hatreds, Woe, an alternate name used by the same account online, purports to be an extremist member of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, a traditional branch of Lutheranism with about 1.8 million members.

As allegations of hateful, alt-right and neo-Nazi members of the church have come to light — such as those involving Dumperth’s alleged Podcast cohost Mahler — the church’s president, Matthew Harrison, earlier this year condemned the “radical and unchristian ‘alt-right’ views” of some of the church’s members.

In Vermont, Dumperth founded Old Route Two Spirits, which produced gin, rum and other spirits. The business received a boost from the Barre Revolving Loan Fund and the Vermont Community Loan Fund, which together approved a $100,000 loan for Old Route Two.

According to Will Belongia, executive director of the Vermont Community Loan Fund, Old Route Two’s loan has been paid off. Belongia said VCLF was “totally unaware” of Dumperth’s beliefs and would not have supported the loan if it was aware of the allegations.

Adam Overbay, who founded Old Route Two alongside Dumperth, said he first was alerted to his former business partner’s apparent beliefs after Dumperth’s photos appeared online linked with Treblewoe.

“It’s obviously very gross,” Overbay said of Dumperth’s alleged online presence. “Weirded out gives a pretty good sense of my emotional state by it. It’s something that’s kind of alien to me.”

According to Overbay, he and Dumperth knew they had differing political beliefs, but Dumperth never made any “overtly racist” comments to him. The two have kept in only sporadic touch since Old Route Two Spirits was bought out in 2020, Overbay said.

When John Fitch Distilling Company purchased Old Route Two in 2020, Ryan Dumperth ceased involvement, according to Shawn Jacobaccio, president of John Fitch.

“The John Fitch Distilling Company supports an inclusive community that works toward making the world a happier place, free of judgement and hatred,” Jacobaccio wrote in a statement. “We like nice people who prioritize helping others. All others.”

In an interview, Jacobaccio said he first heard about Dumperth’s alleged beliefs earlier this month. John Fitch is still paying Dumperth for some of Old Route Two’s inventory, he said.

Up until last year, Dumperth served as vice president of the Williamstown Lutheran Church. In an email, Jim Stone, the congregation’s president, said, “The Church’s Leadership and I have become aware of the online activity and are in the process of gathering all the information.” In response to a further request for comment, he wrote, “Ryan has left the church on his own and does not represent Williamstown Lutheran Church.”

Tax documents show that Dumperth served as a director of the Barre Area Development Corp. in the fiscal year ending June 2019.

Online, Dumperth is perhaps most known for his podcast Stone Choir, which has claimed to attract 30,000 unique visitors. The podcast cohosts describe themselves as bringing a Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod perspective to world affairs. “We’ll probably make you nervous, sometimes make you angry, and never leave you bored,” the show claims.

In practice, though, recent episodes are spent disparaging Martin Luther King Jr. and discussing unfounded allegations that leaders of the LCMS are pedophiles.

Dumperth was first linked with the Stone Choir podcast late last month, when an anonymous group of anti-fascist researchers called Machaira Action sought to connect Dumperth with the online handle “Treblewoe.”

Almost immediately, Treblewoe seemed to affirm the connection. On May 31, the online account posted that he had been “doxed” — online terminology for having one’s identity exposed publicly. The following day, Treblewoe posted a meme that included a picture of Ryan Dumperth that had not been publicized. He referred to the picture of Dumperth as “show(ing) my face.”

In the comments, someone asked “who’s the guy on the left,” referring to the photo of Dumperth.

Treblewoe replied: “me.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Former Barre distillery owner unmasked as neo-Nazi podcaster.

Organizers of the inaugural Small Town Summit hoped to create an event that would transcend boundaries, including township, city and state lines, as well as political boundaries.

“Connectedness,” “empowerment,” “community-focused” were some of the words participants used to describe their experiences after attending the three-day-long, Small Town Summit, created to address the issues of rural America.

The event, put on by the nonprofit organizations United Today, Stronger Tomorrow and Hoosier Action, created a space to amplify small town and rural communities through strategies and collaboration that includes highlighting the voices of Indigenous, Black, immigrant and LGBTQ+ needs.

“Of course you have your paid organizing staff, but you also have community leaders, and you have union leaders, and you have all these different folks and then even within your organizing staff, you have folks of a lot of different experience,” said Micayla Ter Wee, the national organizer for United Today, Stronger Together.

“Sometimes folks, when you hear rural or small town, forget the diversity that is in those communities and we wanted to make sure that that was acknowledged,” Ter Wee said. “And, you know, everyone from the Indigenous communities to our Black and immigrant communities, also had those spaces to talk about their work and their successes and challenges and for all of us to learn from one another.”

Leanette Galaz, Montana Organizer for United Today, Stronger Tomorrow, said the summit in Missoula came together after attending a separate conference with other organizers who work in predominantly urban areas that lean liberal and are more progressive.

Galaz recognizes that urban areas face issues themselves but felt like the “odd man out” because a lot of the organizing they do is usually in conservative areas.

“We started to realize that there were other organizations out there doing work similar to us, but there was no space for us to come together and share our work with each other,” she said.

Ter Wee said that they anticipated to have around 70 people register for the event, however expectations were exceeded when the summit received around 250 registrants. She mentioned that organizations and other attendee expenses like room and board, travel and food were covered by the summit, making it more available for those who wanted to be included.

Trisha Rivers, who is a part of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, presented during the summit, where she helped lead discussions on race and Indigenous history. Her session, titled Indigified, encouraged people to initiate in the often hard conversation about colonization and the Doctrine of Discovery in order for others to understand the Indigenous approach and perspective to community building and empowerment.

“Addressing the real trauma that has happened to us as peoples and having those uncomfortable conversations with non-Natives to say, this is not how we specifically build power,” Rivers said in an interview after her session. “This is how we do things and how we look at community building and relationship building and nation building and it may look a little bit different.”

The ‘Indigified’ session created a safe space that welcomed everyone to be a part of the uncomfortable conversation about race. Rivers said she hopes participants left the session with better tools to address their own organizational spaces and mindsets.

“What I would want for them to take away is that they know now that they have some kind of insight to begin their own decolonization process but to use the education and information and to really change the systems of oppression of overt racism and to really start calling out their own people to be honest to change.”

Located in Sioux City, Iowa, Rivers is also the Siouxland project director for the Great Plains Action Society, an Indigenous led nonprofit organization. The nonprofit’s work reaches Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota and focuses on issues including cultural revitalization and political engagement.

She is also the first Indigenous representative to be on Sioux City’s first ever inclusive committee, where her role is to be the voice for her community when issues arise and to ensure that there are inviting spaces for Indigenous collaboration – initiatives that Rivers say begin with these uncomfortable conversations.

“What we see a lot of the times is that we, especially in rural areas and in small cities, that a lot of our boards and public elected officials are not really representative of our communities,” Rivers said. “It’s mostly Republican led, white males, and, you know, that’s not okay because our communities are not. We’re so diverse.”

Among the participants of the summit that was a part of the discussion was Michael Hovde with the For Our Future Foundation who sat in on the Indigified session. Hovde, who is based in Wisconsin, said during the discussion that the session delivered an impactful message which brought some insight to the Native perspective.

Hovde said he believes he will be able to take away ideas for his own work with Four Our Future Foundation when conducting their own Native outreach work within Wisconsin. He also didn’t mind being a part of the tough talk on Indigenous peoples as he was a contributor to the discussion.

“I think it’s important to lean into uncomfortable conversations sometimes because that’s how you make progress. That’s how you move forward,” Hovde said. “You know, if you don’t have an uncomfortable conversation where you, for example, confront your biases about a particular group, then how are you going to get past those biases or overcome or reshape them?”

Also from Sioux City was Brandon Arreaga, Omaha Tribe of Nebraska and Mexican. Before attending the summit, he had never been on a plane before.

During a session titled, “Native Wins: Native organizers sharing stories with other Native and non-Native communities,” he spoke of his experience as a formerly incarcerated individual and reconnecting with his Native and Mexican identity.

Arreaga said that he doesn’t have a Native name but joked that if he did, it would be “NDN Taco.” He said Native wins are not only in the courthouse, but “our wins are everywhere;” adding that the session was insightful and powerful.

“To be able to hear those stories of different types of wins that our Native people have accomplished and those stories need to be shared more so we can see why we’re fighting, what we’re fighting for and we’re preserving our culture and our ways,” he said.

Now working as a carpenter, Arreaga said he is rebuilding communities he once destroyed as a gang member. The summit brought him out of his comfort zone and returning home, he wants to take back what he learned to help get out the Native vote and help Native men rise above any current situations they may find themselves in.

“Healing is the strongest medicine we have,” he said.

One primary example of a rural Indigenous organization facing issues in their home state is the Riverton Peace Mission located in Riverton, Wyoming, where they address bordertown racism and violence.

“We’re here to get some more knowledge of how to better be advocates for what we’re doing. I think the leadership development here and the base building is gonna be really helpful in how we succeed,” said Leslie Spoonhunter, Northern Arapaho, co-chair for the Riverton Peace Mission.

Riverton is a town located on the Wind River Indian Reservation which is shared by two tribes, the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho. According to the Riverton Peace Mission webpage, its main goal is to focus on “advanced healing, reconciliation and community harmony,” concepts that Spoonhutner saw in the Indigified session.

“It’s really a touchy subject, especially when there’s like non-Natives involved but I think we’re all here for the right reasons and forward thinking. So I felt good about it. You know, I haven’t really been into a session like that before, so I got a lot out of it,” Spoonhunter said after the session was out. “Very much needed because we all lived together on Earth, like we are all in our communities together. So yes, we need to have those very heartfelt and hard conversations.”

The summit featured a Native and Indigenous Caucus which Michelle Sparck, Cup’ik, was excited about.

“I’m really psyched to see a caucus,” she said. “I mean, usually we don’t have that kind of presence, maybe there’s a one-off or a two-off, a token; but no, we have a caucus and that’s really exciting.”

Sparck works as the director of strategic initiatives for Get Out The Native Vote in Alaska. Organizing is not new to her, over the years she has worked in Washington, D.C., working with politicians and big agencies.

She was heartened to see the Native representation at the summit and the ability to show others that Indigenous organizations can be a valuable ally.

“I just see so much potential in this kind of gathering.”

The post New summit uplifts rural, Indigenous voices to empower appeared first on Buffalo’s Fire.

Selawik, Alaska, is a Iñupiat Eskimo community where generations have survived off the land.

The post Q&A: Boys & Girls Clubs – Alaska CEO Jen Patronas on what it’s like to run an afterschool program in the Arctic appeared first on Youth Today.

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.

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Smoke from Canadian wildfires that turned skies along the East Coast a sickly yellow also brought air quality alerts to much of the Midwest this week. State health departments cautioned people with heart and lung conditions to reduce outdoor exposure.

It’s likely more days of bad air will come — not only are fires burning in the west in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and in the east in Quebec, but new blazes have erupted in Ontario, directly north of Minnesota, according to Minnesota Pollution Control Agency air quality meteorologist David Brown. The next plume could arrive Friday.

“We’re kind of surrounded at this point. Any wind direction is likely going to bring some smoke now,” Brown said.

In mid-May, sustained winds blew wildfire smoke in from the West, then a few slow-moving weather systems brought stagnant air that triggered ozone advisories.

“It’s been a very unique spring,” said Craig Czarnecki, outreach coordinator for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resource’s air management program.

Climate experts say that as the planet continues to warm, this kind of spring will become less and less of an anomaly. In the process, air quality will continue to worsen, as will its impact on human health.

The largest fires have historically been concentrated in the West, and though there are examples of damaging fires elsewhere, wildfire scientists assumed the eastern part of the continent was immune from the worst effects, said Erica Smithwick, director of the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Penn State.

That’s proving untrue.

Higher temperatures, periods of drought and more volatile winds are yielding wildfires that burn faster and stronger than before, Smithwick said. Wildfire season is also getting longer, as rivers in the West dry out sooner and the East sees stronger storms mixed with drought. Some scientists question whether the whole idea of a wildfire season still applies.

“I’ve studied wildfires for decades, and I’m quite alarmed by the changes that we’re seeing to the wildfire systems,” Smithwick said.

The severity of the fires is even affecting how far their smoke can travel. Smithwick said the stronger the blaze, the higher into the atmosphere the smoke can waft, being picked up by winds that travel long distances and ultimately push it into places it wouldn’t normally go.

Air pollution worsens respiratory, heart problems

Fine particulate matter, also known as PM2.5, is one of the main pollutants released from wildfire smoke, which are so tiny they “penetrate pretty deep into our lungs and get into our bloodstream,” according to Katelyn O’Dell, a researcher at George Washington University.

Hotter summers are also making stagnant air days more frequent, according to an analysis from Climate Central, a nonprofit news organization that analyzes and reports on climate science. During those stagnation events, pollutants like ozone get trapped and make breathing more difficult.

Both fine particles from wildfire smoke and ozone can cause respiratory issues like coughing, difficulty breathing and aggravated asthma. People doing physical activity outdoors, particularly those who already suffer from respiratory problems, will usually find it harder to do.

On top of that, PM2.5 can have more dramatic effects because the particles are small enough to get deep into the lungs and even the bloodstream.

“Particulate matter is one of the most well-studied types of air pollution, and it is incredibly dangerous to the body,” said Dr. Neelu Tummala, a clinical assistant professor of surgery and co-director of the Climate and Health Institute at George Washington University.

While short-term exposure typically results in respiratory concerns, chronic exposure brings worsening impacts like increased risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke, Tummala said.

For Black, brown and low-income communities, which already bear a higher burden of air pollution, the recent short-term exposures could further elevate their risk.

Both fine particle and ozone exposure can also result in pregnancy complications like preterm births and babies with low birth weights, Tummala said.

And a 2021 study in the journal Pediatrics found that the particles in that smoke are 10 times more harmful to children’s respiratory health than other types of air pollution. Smithwick, who is also a representative of the Science Moms campaign, said kids are vulnerable because they are more active, play outside more and are still growing.

“We’re definitely going to be seeing this play out in our health systems for many years to come,” she said.

Protect yourself from dirty air

Pay attention to air quality. The Air Quality Index, or AQI, measures risk from dirty air on a scale of 0 to 500. The AQI doesn’t measure the amount of a specific pollutant but generally reflects health impact.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow site offers real-time readings of AQI and also shows where fires are burning and where smoke is wafting. Purple Air, a company that makes air sensors, also has a network of AQI sensor readings at map.purpleair.com.

People should start paying attention at the orange category of AQI — readings between 101 and 150. That’s when sensitive groups like children, the elderly and those with breathing or heart conditions can encounter problems, said Brown.

He added that relatively healthy people might start to feel headaches or chest tightness at the higher end of orange readings.

In the red category from 151 to 200 AQI, all people, regardless of health, may start to feel effects; the purple category from 201 to 300 is considered very unhealthy; and maroon readings of 301 or higher are hazardous.

Avoid time outdoors when the air is bad. Jesse Berman, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health, said it’s safest to stay inside with windows closed and air conditioning on. In a car, run the air conditioner set to re-circulate in the interior of the vehicle, he said.

Put those N95 masks back on. For those who have to be outside for work or commuting, try to relocate tasks or reschedule them, reduce strenuous activity, take breaks in a place free of smoke, and wear a well-fitting mask designed to filter out small particles, like an N95.

The Centers for Disease Control warns, however, that N95 masks are not made to fit children and will not work effectively to protect them from smoke.

Filter your indoor air. In the home, air purifiers with high-quality HEPA filters can help remove pollution that sneaks inside, Berman said.

It may also be worth switching out the filter on a home HVAC system. Airflow filters with a higher MERV rating, an industry measurement of how effective the screen is in capturing small particles, can also help. The Environmental Protection Agency recommends MERV 13 or higher.

Berman warned, though, that tighter filters can clog more quickly and may need to be changed more often. For a cheaper option, O’Dell recommended creating one at home with some filters taped to the four edges of a box fan — a do-it-yourself method known as a Corsi-Rosenthal box.

Wildfire smoke is new hazard in upper Midwest is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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