By Julia Tilton for The Daily Yonder.
Broadcast version by Mark Richardson for Oregon News Service for the Public News Service/Daily Yonder Collaboration

When Oregon’s 2024 fire season ended in late October, over 1.9 million acres had burned across the state – an area larger than Delaware. For Tyler McCarty, district manager at the Coos Forest Protective Association (CFPA), in the coastal southwest part of the state, fires today are a “night and day difference” from what they were twenty years ago. 

McCarty spent more than two decades with the Oregon Department of Forestry before starting his current position in rural Coos County, where he also commands one of the state’s incident management teams that responds to large fires and other natural disasters. He started his career right out of high school as an entry level firefighter, and has been fighting fires since 2000.

“When I first started, a two or three thousand acre fire was a big fire,” McCarty told the Daily Yonder. “One of the fires that my incident management team was on this year was 180,000 acres.”

As the Oregon fire season trends longer and fires burn larger, McCarty and others who work with Oregon’s remaining few forest protective associations are grappling with questions about how they will retain personnel and secure enough funding to fight the fires of the future.

“You need more people to manage a 180,000 acre fire versus a 6,000 acre fire, which our system is kind of built on,” McCarty said. “Right now we’re operating in a system with a funding model that doesn’t support the fires that we’re seeing today.”

A Century of Community-Based Forest Protection

The first iteration of the forest protective association in Coos County was organized in 1910. Two years later, in 1912, the Douglas Forest Protective Association (DFPA) formed in the next county over. In those days, the goal was fewer fires and a sense of shared responsibility among those who owned and logged land in Oregon’s forests. 

Nowadays, the state of Oregon mandates that private forest landowners – many of whom are in the timber industry – have fire protection. Membership in a forest protective association like the one McCarty leads is one way to meet that requirement. 

The state of Oregon provides about 50% of the funding for these associations, according to Patrick Skrip, the district manager at DFPA. The other 50% comes from private and public landowners, such as the Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Indian Affairs. Currently, Oregon has three forest protective associations that operate with this or a similar funding model. 

To the east, Idaho has its own version of community-based forest protection. Called timber protective associations, the state’s two organizations have operated in some form since the early 1900s. At the edge of the Payette National Forest in McCall, Idaho, the Southern Idaho Timber Protective Association protects over half a million acres including private land, state-owned land, and portions of federally-owned land and national forests. In northern Idaho, the Clearwater-Potlatch Timber Protective Association protects nearly one million acres owned by private landowners and state and federal agencies. 

As in Idaho, Oregon’s forest protective associations provide fire suppression and prevention services rooted in community partnership. There are no similar protective associations anywhere else in the country. 

“It’s a system that’s been in place for over a hundred years, and we believe that the best answers come locally,” Skrip told the Daily Yonder.

This local approach is exemplified by the resources shared between private landowners and their forest protective associations. Ken Canon, the president of the board of DFPA, said it is common practice for landowners to lend firefighting teams their timber equipment like excavators and dozers during a fire.

“The nature of DFPA and the way it’s set up is that they not only value the resource that the landowners own, but they also value the very, very close relationships they have with the landowners,” Canon said.

Canon is a retired attorney who has lived in rural Oregon for most of his life, and in Douglas County for over two decades. The 282 acre parcel of land he owns is part of the 1.6 million acres DFPA manages. Mostly forested, the area makes up some of the most productive timberlands in the lower forty-eight, Skrip told the Daily Yonder. It is also a vital part of the local economy. 

In the summer, this same land can pose a significant fire risk. But shutting down timber production, even temporarily, also means shutting down an income stream for local landowners. As a district fire warden, Skrip is one of the people with authority to close the woods for logging activity. It is not a responsibility he takes lightly.

“Those are tough decisions, and I’m very mindful,” Skrip said. “They impact our operator community and our mills, and those are mortgages that people have to pay.”

When Skrip has had to make those tough calls, the larger private landowners have generally supported the decision, Canon said. Many landowners – Canon included – take their own measures when it comes to fire prevention. In Coos County, McCarty said private landowners do the same, from making evacuation plans to ensuring their homes are as defensible for firefighters as possible. 

Even with the close cooperation between landowners and their forest protective associations, the increase in bigger fires burning at the same time means resources are stretched thin.

Firefighting Challenges

Ken Canon has a 120º vista from his property, which sits atop a small mountain surrounded on two sides by forest owned by the federal Bureau of Land Management. That land has not been managed in any way for years, Canon said, partly because of efforts to protect the spotted owl that date back to the 1990s. Today, the land is heavily forested as a result.

“It’s pretty dense, and the denser the fire, the more intense they are,” Canon said.

To mitigate against a future fire on the federal lands jumping to his property, Canon has taken to creating a boundary between his property and the federally-owned neighboring land. He said he has taken out the undergrowth on his side of the property line and left the old-growth trees with space between them.

Forest management is just one part of the story when it comes to the kinds of fire blazing in Oregon today. Dense forests like the one bordering Canon’s property are filled with fuels that sustain fires. On the landscape’s other extreme, burn scars from previous fires that have experienced some regrowth also provide what Skrip calls “light and flashy fuel” for fires to consume quickly as they advance. 

Climate change is also upsetting conventional methods for fire management. Warmer-than-average temperatures and heat waves during the summer season dry out fuels. Combine this with the state’s current megadrought conditions, which are drier than any other period in the past thousand years, and there is a new host of challenges for fire prevention and suppression efforts. 

“In this era of fire, we’ve seen more acres burned in our district in the last 10 years than in the last hundred years combined,” Skrip said. The fire regime is also marching to new lengths, Skrip said, with burning happening more frequently north of Roseburg and in the foothills of the Cascades. 

Adam Sinkey, the North Unit Forester for DFPA, started firefighting at seventeen, and has worked his way up the ranks since the early 2000s. During the first half of his career at DFPA, Sinkey said there was one big fire beyond what the district could handle. That was in 2004, and Sinkey said the district’s next big fire after that was in 2013. Now, Sinkey said, those big fires have become commonplace.

“We’ve had one in the district or multiple in the district it seems like every year, or every other year, ever since 2013,” Sinkey said. 

Larger and more severe fires strain a system where there are only so many resources to go around. Fires also carry a significant financial burden and put a heavy physical and mental demand on firefighters. McCarty said his team spent 50 days out in the field this past summer. Other teams were out for as long as 60 days.

“That’s a lot of days sleeping in a tent during the summertime, sleeping in the dirt,” McCarty said. Asking firefighters to be away from their families for months on end while working some of the toughest seasons the state has seen risks high rates of burnout. And while both CFPA and DFPA offer wintertime work in the form of co-ops to retain summer employees, the associations still face year-over-year retention challenges.

Sinkey is one firefighter who built his career in part thanks to DFPA’s winter co-op programs. When, after college, he realized he wanted to make firefighting his full-time job, he stayed on throughout the year. Sinkey’s co-op work ranged from supporting fuel reduction in Douglas County – much like what Canon does each year on his own property – to short stints with the Oregon Department of Transportation operating snowplows on state highway mountain passes. Today, Sinkey said around 40 of DFPA’s 100 summertime employees stick around for the winter co-op program. 

“Not only are we reducing heavy fuel loads around people’s homes, but it also allows us to retain good folks and good firefighters throughout the years,” Sinkey said. 

Still, Skrip and McCarty agreed they could do with even more full-time employees as today’s fires demand additional resources. Year-round employees allow forest protective associations to retain their leadership on the ground. Ultimately, Sinkey said, it’s “boots on the ground” that put out fires. 

But shifting the hiring model to have the majority of employees be permanent would require increased funding at the state level. 

Finding a New Funding Model

After the catastrophic 2020 Labor Day Fires destroyed more than 1 million acres over the course of a few days in Southern Oregon, 2021 ushered in a series of conversations among the public and the state government about how to better fund firefighting efforts across the state. 

In 2024, a large portion of the 1.9 million acres burned were in Eastern Oregon, a predominantly rural region. Canon said he expects there will be talk about the cost of those fires – a staggering $317.5 million across the state – in the 2025 legislative session.

For private landowners and the forest protective associations that provide for them, the price tag is a reminder of the burden that falls on rural communities.

Private landowners who are members of their local forest protective associations pay for their coverage by the acre. Prices have gone up across the board, McCarty said, to the point where fire protection is no longer affordable, particularly for ranchers and grazers whose land generates less profit than timber.

A more holistic approach to funding would include more investment from urban folks, Canon and McCarty said. Already, every Oregonian pays into a general fund that accounts for 50% of the funding that is dispersed to forest protective associations like in Coos and Douglas counties. But a new era of fire demands more financial resources. Canon and McCarty said those cannot come from rural landowners alone, especially when the fires affect everyone.

One idea is to impose a tax on camping equipment or cars, since both are connected to fires and their common causes: fires set from recreation and malfunctions with catalytic converters. Another idea is to raise the state’s income tax to cover the growing costs of fire protection in the state. A task force was organized by Oregon’s governor earlier this year to look at future possibilities for fire funding. Their findings are due before the legislative session begins in February 2025. 

Canon said he wants to see more participation from urban areas, where he said the effects of fire are only growing more apparent.

“What we’ve seen in the last 10 years is it’s not fun going to the Shakespearean Festival in Ashland in choking smoke,” he said. “It’s not just a discomfort, but it’s a health risk.”


Julia Tilton wrote this article for The Daily Yonder.


get more stories like this via email

By Dawn Attride for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Freda Ross for Texas News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

President-elect Donald Trump has picked long-term ally Brooke Rollins to lead the Department of Agriculture. Her nomination is somewhat of a surprise; Kelly Loeffler, former U.S. senator, was rumored to be Trump's initial pick for the role. Rollins is also a surprising pick because she hasn't worked directly in agricultural policy.

Rollins acted as domestic policy director in the White House during Trump's first term, and has since gone on to preside over the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a Trump-aligned think tank. She grew up on a farm in Glen Rose, Texas, which is known for its farming and ranching activities. Apart from her undergraduate degree in agricultural leadership and development from Texas A&M University, she doesn't appear to have much experience in agricultural policy.

Rollins took to X after the announcement, saying it will be the honor of her life to fight for America's farmers and agricultural communities. "This is big stuff for a small-town ag girl from Glen Rose, TX - truly the American Dream at its greatest. WHO'S READY TO MAKE AGRICULTURE GREAT AGAIN?" she wrote.

Reactions to the Nomination

If confirmed, Rollins will direct the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and its 100,000 employees, running on an annual budget of upwards of $437 billion. The USDA oversees food security, agricultural production, promotes rural development and provides financial aid to farmers and low-income families. The USDA was founded to carry out research on agriculture, and at its core, is a research-centered organization.

"Outside of a misdirected interest in Chinese ownership of U.S. farmland, Brooke Rollins appears to have no agricultural policy track record to comment on. Rollins' AFPI, described as the second Trump administration in waiting, has so little interest in farm policy that there are no agriculture experts listed on its website," Karen Perry Stillerman, deputy director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement.

Stillerman added that this appears to be another example of Trump "doling out cabinet appointments for loyalty rather than expertise." Two of Trump's other picks also came from AFPI -- Linda McMahon, for Education Secretary, and Scott Turner as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Industry groups appear to be optimistic about her nomination, however. The American Farm Bureau Federation said they're encouraged by her statement that she'd "fight for America's farmers and our nation's agricultural communities."

What Can We Expect From Rollins?

Importantly, Rollins has the upcoming new iteration of the Farm Bill ahead of her, which has significant sway over America's food systems. With Republicans having a majority in the House and Senate, the updated Farm Bill could repeal Proposition 12, a high-impact animal welfare law that banned certain kinds of extreme confinement of animals, and the sale of such products in California.

The Farm Bill is also crucial for food emissions and conservation. While Rollins hasn't said much publicly regarding climate change, the think tank she leads has published articles promoting fracking and criticizing the Paris Agreement.

Rollins' new role will likely overlap significantly with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s mission to "Make America Healthy Again," by eliminating certain pesticides and food additives, as well as reforming dietary guidelines.

But Kennedy's opposition to GMOs and pesticides poses "a significant threat" to American agriculture being a global leader when it comes to reducing its carbon footprint while maintaining high yields, Emily Bass, an associate director of federal policy at the Breakthrough Institute, tells Sentient. (Contrary to popular belief, for example, organic foods are usually less climate-friendly.)

"Should she be confirmed as the next U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, we hope Brooke Rollins will be a force to defend against RFK Jr.'s vision, and instead lead a USDA that recognizes the value of technology-forward advances," Bass says.


Dawn Attride wrote this article for Sentient.


get more stories like this via email

By Rebecca R. Randall for Yes! Magazine.
Broadcast version by Trimmel Gomes for Florida News Connection reporting for the YES! Media-Public News Service Collaboration

This past spring, a colorful poster displayed a ring of emojis at a student table outside the cafeteria at Maritime and Science Technical Academy, a 6–12 school in Miami. Called the climate emotions wheel, the circle was divided into a rainbow of wedges for various emotions: anger in red, sadness in purple, fear in green, positivity in blue. The poster also included a QR code for students to complete a survey about their feelings related to climate. 

Sophomore Sophia Bugarim remembers taking the survey. To the first question—“Do you experience any of these climate emotions?”—Bugarim answered “fear.” The next question narrowed down the four core emotions into more specifics. This time Bugarim selected “worry.” 

“I feel worried that one day I’ll be in a situation where I have to leave my house, and I’ll come back and have no idea what it will look like,” says Bugarim, who recalled her survey answers on an October day when school had been canceled due to the possibility of storm water surge and high winds. While Miami was not in Hurricane Milton’s path, Bugarim wonders how soon the city will be in the path of another storm. “These storms are getting worse. There was a hurricane last week in Tallahassee. Next week gets me worried. It’s very unpredictable.”

Sebastian Navarro, who manned the table as sustainability ambassador during his senior year, thinks students at Maritime and Science Technical Academy probably learn about climate change more than others in the district due to the school’s focus on maritime sciences. He says students visit the reefs just offshore from the beachside school. But that classwork is focused on cognitive learning, not discussion about feelings. 

On the climate emotions survey, when given options for what worries them most about climate change, about one-third of students said sea level rise. Another third said biodiversity loss and coral bleaching. 

Sarah Newman, executive director of the Climate Mental Health Network, says climate change adds another layer of mental health risk for youth and can deepen existing inequities. In 2021, Newman founded the Network to provide solutions beyond traditional therapy, which can be cost-prohibitive and faces ongoing provider shortages. 

She sees the climate emotions wheel as a supplement to mental health therapy and believes schools are a key place to address mental health amid a changing climate. This is a stark contrast with the conservative Project 2025, which aims to erase climate change from public education and the federal government entirely. Newman sees the importance in grassroots solutions to support individuals and communities impacted by the changing climate, regardless of what’s happening in Washington, D.C. 

“Having climate anxiety is a normal response to the climate crisis, so if you respond to what is a societal issue with an individual approach, you’re isolating someone’s experience to a clinical setting,” she says. “Because it’s a collective experience, the process of navigating our climate emotions, managing them, and healing needs to be done in community with others.” 

A New Tool

Multiple reports suggest there is plenty of room for improvement to deepen climate content across subjects and add more social and emotional learning in public schools in the United States. On the National Center for Science Education’s 2020 report card, Florida received a D for its lack of climate change content in state science standards. The center graded 20 states at no higher than a C+, while 21 states, which all use the Next Generation Science Standards, received a B+.

Then in 2022, the North American Association for Environmental Education found only 37% of states included climate change in one subject in addition to science (usually social studies), and only 10% of climate change content addressed the socio-emotional learning dimensions of the crisis.

A 2023 report led by the American Psychological Association and others concurs that more school-based and health-system solutions are needed. Newman sees the climate emotions wheel as a tool that educators everywhere can begin using now. It’s a bottom-up approach that can skirt the obstacles being thrown up in institutions and governments at all levels.

Finnish environmental theologian Panu Pihkala, who popularized the idea that “climate emotions” is a more useful term than “climate anxiety,” consulted with the Climate Mental Health Network to create the climate emotions wheel. It is now available in 30 languages, including Spanish, Kiswahili, and Bengali, and used in a variety of settings.

“Everything about the school day is a learning experience. It’s not just the curriculum being directed by the teacher,” said Michele Drucker, who heads the Miami-Dade County Council Parent Teacher Association environmental committee.

Drucker also ran a sustainability ambassador program in local high schools, which Navarro completed during his lunch hours. Navarro invited students to enter a drawing for completing climate actions such as bringing a reusable water bottle, using share tables for uneaten food at lunch, and eliminating single-use plastics. This is also where Navarro shared the climate emotions wheel, which he says received a lot of engagement and seemed to bump up participation in the weeks that followed.

Navarro says the wheel helped generate hallway conversations about climate, too, as peers asked each other: “Which emoji are you?”

Climate Emotions in the Classroom

In other schools, teachers are adding the climate emotions wheel to their coursework.

“One of the biggest problems with climate education is not a lack of knowledge,” says Kimberly Williams, a science teacher at Smithtown High School West on Long Island in New York. She began integrating emotional support into her climate change units a few years ago. She says her classes would start the year “discouraged and apathetic,” and that “it’s easy for the students to feel ‘there’s nothing I can do, so I should do nothing.’”

Williams tasked her students with using the paint tool on a tablet to shade portions in a circle representing the degree to which they were feeling a climate emotion. A guide then helped them describe their emotions and evaluate their own strengths and possible contributions to climate solutions.

Williams concedes that most science teachers do not include this kind of social and emotional learning into their lessons: “They don’t see the two as interwoven, and I don’t see the two as something you can separate.”

Williams says in her district, most teachers only “dance around the subject” in an effort to avoid the politics of climate change. To her, that indicates that teachers aren’t connecting it to students’ lives. “They’re showing a graph,” not saying, “‘Why do you think that is?’ or ‘What we can do about it?’”

In nearby New York City, 52% of teachers in a survey said they teach about climate change, but most only dedicate a few hours per year. A recent state bill, which died at the end of the 2024 legislative session, would have mandated that all grades and subject matters include climate.

This bill would have addressed mental health, as well, said Elissa Teles Muñoz, the K–12 programming manager for the Climate Mental Health Network, at a recent Climate Week NYC panel. 

“When there is climate education … it does need to include safeguards for youth mental health,” said Muñoz, who helped write the bill with the National Wildlife Federation. “It’s not responsible to drop a bomb on a child’s brain.”

Growing Support From the Grassroots

The climate emotions wheel relies on grassroots leaders—teachers, parents, or others—to find ways to implement it, which may limit its reach and impact.

Some teachers may not feel supported to include the exercise. Susan Clayton, a conservation psychologist who studies K–12 climate education, considered teacher surveys alongside local politics. She found that teachers from states where school or government leaders oppose climate education felt more anxious. For example, the 7% of teachers in Clayton’s sample who were from Florida reported significantly higher levels of climate anxiety.

But Clayton found that when teachers perceived parental support for climate education, they were more likely to talk to students about climate emotions. 

In Miami-Dade public schools, Drucker is bolstered by how the PTA can bypass some state or district politics with grassroots action at schools. She advocated for years for systems-level climate action, though Florida schools lack state support for fully embracing climate action. And that obstacle is only getting worse: Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill this spring that strikes the phrase “climate change” from state law entirely.

Newman also believes there’s power in hyperlocal action. One of the climate emotions wheel’s strengths may be that it empowers students. 

For Williams’ part, she includes the climate emotions exercise to help students move toward action. At the end of her courses, she asks students to complete the survey again and asks what they would modify from their earlier responses. One student updated the colors in the wheel and said she felt a little more empowered to take her own actions once she wrote them down.

Navarro says he is still working through climate emotions, but he feels encouraged by peer support in the environmental clubs at his school. “You have the opportunity to advocate for different causes,” he says. Recently, students acted on their concerns by advocating for and landing the district electric buses. Navarro says it feels good to know that “you’re actually making a difference.”


Rebecca R. Randall wrote this article for Yes! Magazine.


get more stories like this via email

Michigan has poured $1 billion into electric-vehicle battery projects, with another billion pledged, but delays have stalled hiring for most of the 11,000 promised jobs. Now, some critics are raising concerns over the subsidies for the projects.

Economic experts say delays are common in large-scale projects, and it's too early to call this effort a bust.

Brad Hershbein, a senior economist for the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, cited slower EV demand and opposition from residents who don't want large factories in their neighborhoods. He said limited job postings are another key factor.

"Where there have been some job postings, [they] are typically for engineers and for doing design, and managers," he said, "and there's still a lot of uncertainty coming ahead with the new presidential administration - where some of the incentives that have been slated to be given out may not be given out in the end."

A 2024 poll revealed that while 55% of Michigan voters believe it's important for the state to compete in electric-vehicle manufacturing, only about one in four would consider purchasing an EV as their next vehicle.

Despite delays, Michigan continues to prepare for EV battery job growth. In western Michigan, educators are training a workforce for Ford's 2026 factory, and Western Michigan University announced a $700,000 plan to boost training for battery and semiconductor jobs.

Hershbein noted that developers often overpromise.

"It may turn out that, years from now, this was a good investment to try to spur greater production of electronic vehicles, electric vehicles and jobs for them," he said. "We just don't know yet. It's going to depend on how the next several years play out."

In December 2023, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed a plan to make all of Michigan's state vehicles zero-emission by 2040.


get more stories like this via email