By Katie Myers for Grist.
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan for West Virginia News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

When politicians and planners think about climate adaptation, they’re often considering the hard edges of infrastructure and economics. Will we divert flooding? Should we restore shorelines? Can we fireproof homes? Folklorist Maida Owens believes such questions don’t capture the full picture. When climate disaster comes for the diverse Cajun and Creole fishing communities of Louisiana’s islands and bayous, it has the potential to tear their cultural fabric apart.

“There’s more to community resilience than the physical protection of properties,” Owens, who works with Louisiana’s state folklife program, told Grist. 

Radical change is already occurring. Louisiana’s coast is slowly being swallowed by the sea; the Southwest is drying out; Appalachia’s transition from coal has been no less disruptive than a recent battery of floods and storms. These crises, which are unfolding nationwide, interrupt not only infrastructure, but the rituals and remembrances that make up daily life.

The study of those rituals and rememberances may seem like an esoteric discipline, one relegated to exploring quaint superstitions of the past or documenting old men in overalls playing homemade instruments. It’s true that those who study and preserve folklore don’t concern themselves with high art — that is, the sort of thing supported by networks of patronage and philanthropy and gallery exhibitions. Their mission is to record the culture of ordinary people: us. Our jokes, our songs, our spiritual practices, our celebrations, our recipes. Such things are the glue that holds society together, and as the climate changes our ways of life, Owens and her peers say, it’s important to pay attention to how culture adjusts. 

Doing that goes beyond the practical question of how people will carry their heritage into a world reshaped by climate change. It requires looking to tradition-bearers — the people within a community who are preserving its customs, songs, and stories and passing them on — for clues to how best to navigate this tumultuous time without losing generations of knowledge. In that way, folklorists across the country increasingly strive to help communities adapt to a new reality, understand how tradition shifts in times of crisis, and even inform climate policy. Folklore doesn’t seem like it would teach us how to adapt to a warming world, but even as it looks over our collective shoulder at the past, it can prepare us for a future that is in many ways already here.

In the coal towns of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, Emily Hilliard has written extensively on this idea, which she calls visionary folklore. She looks for ways to sustain culture as those who practice it experience incredible change so that they might “send traditions on to the future.” As climate disaster threatens to wipe away entire towns and ways of life — both literally, in the case of the communities lost to the floods that ravaged Kentucky in 2022, and figuratively through the loss of archives and museums to those inundations — she considers this continuity an essential part of retaining a sense of place and identity, two intangible feelings that help give life meaning. 

“Folklorists can help communities pass on these traditions,” she said.

Hilliard is a former West Virginia state folklorist who has, among other things, collected oral histories, songs, artwork, and legends for the West Virginia Folklife Program. It’s impossible to talk about climate in Appalachia without talking about coal, and the communities she has documented have a gnarled and thorny relationship with that industry, which has both sustained them and helped create the climate impacts they’re left to grapple with. 

People, Hilliard said, face a grave risk in “the way that climate disaster breaks up communities, so that communities may no longer be able to share food and music traditions.” Visionary folklore is, in part, about trying to restore, replace, and sustain these things, while finding ways to bulwark and adapt traditions for an uncertain future.

Climate change, like the coal industry that fostered it, threatens to rewrite some of the region’s cultural memory. Hilliard recalls members of the Scotts Run Museum in Osage, West Virginia, a place where town elders regularly play music, tell stories, and share meals, talking of rising floodwaters threatening their community gathering spaces. She sees collaboration with communities to preserve these important community resources as part of her life’s work.

As she strives to help communities sustain old traditions, Hilliard sees new ones emerging as coping strategies for a world in which foundations are shifting. As floods have repeatedly swept through Appalachia, she has seen communities come together to repair and replace family quilts, musical instruments, and other heirlooms and keepsakes, some of which were painstakingly crafted by hand and many of which have been handed down through generations. Community members in Scotts Run established “repair cafes” where people with various skills helped neighbors recover. Coal company towns’ often hardscrabble existence made such expertise necessary, and in an era of looming environmental destruction, those knowledge pathways allow people to simultaneously come together to grieve and to begin to rebuild their community. Such things are not limited to Appalachia, of course.

“There may exist beneficial practices and adaptations to crises within our historical and current practices,” said Kimi Eisele, a folklorist with the Southwest Folklife Alliance in Tucson, Arizona. Eisele, who is beginning a folklife project focused on climate change, manages Borderlore, a journal operated by the Southwest Folklife Alliance. It recently received a $150,000 grant to collect oral histories that amplify the environmental history and future of the Southwest through the eyes of Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and other historically excluded people.

In southern Arizona, where Eisele lives and works, triple-digit temperatures, aridity, and groundwater depletion present a dire threat to agriculture and even long-term human settlement. Many of the interviews Eisele and others have collected focus on the impacts of climate change on Indigenous traditions and how those traditions are changing. The Tohono O’odham, whose ancestral land is divided by the border with Mexico, have for example long relied on willow for basket-weaving, but as farms and groundwater diversion have lowered the water table, willows have dried up and died. Basket-weavers now use the hardier yucca plant. Climate change is also causing traditional adobe homes to crack and decay; Native architects are working to shore them up and explore how modern technology can preserve them, even as the structures provide a model for building cooler, more energy-efficient homes. 

The interviews describe adaptations made over millennia that still work – mind-boggling, perhaps, to a society that has managed to nearly deplete its resources in just a few hundred years. The Hopi, Tohono O’odham, Diné, and other peoples have weathered climate fluctuations, droughts, floods, and famine in the tens of thousands of years they’ve lived in the Southwest. Hopi farmer Michael Kotutwa Johnson, who raises corn, believes that heritage provides essential tools for adapting to the climate crisis. He is working to ensure others learn to use them.

“As Hopis, we adjust to these environmental fluctuations,” Johnson told Eisele in an interview for the Climate Lore oral history series. “It’s part of our faith.” Even if this period of climate crisis is unprecedented and unpredictable, Johnson says, he feels prepared to bear it out.

Johnson is a dryland farmer, meaning he uses traditional farming methods that don’t require irrigation. He relies on the annual monsoon to water his fields, and on what he knows of the land to prepare for the season ahead. In 2018, for example, he realized early on that a drought was intensifying because “biological indicators that usually appear in April weren’t there,” he told Eisele. “Plants weren’t greening up, so we knew the soil moisture wasn’t going to be there.” In response, he and other Hopi farmers planted only a quarter of their usual crop to avoid depleting the soil. What he describes as “bumper” years can take communities through leaner times — if everyone is careful and pays attention. 

“We’ve had a system in place to handle a lot of it. We plant enough to last three to five years,” Johnson told Eisele. “When you have everybody doing that, then you have to have a good supply to get through climatic changes.” 

He hopes other farmers, particularly Native farmers, collaborate in practicing regenerative agriculture rather than relying on destructive groundwater withdrawal to maintain crops the desert simply can’t support. Eisele finds stories like Johnson’s invaluable in helping people everywhere adapt. “We are really looking at folklife as a tool for liberation,” she said.

Along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Maida Owens, takes such work a step farther, trying to use folklore to shape public policy and make the world more welcoming toward those displaced by the climate crisis.

The Bayou State has been losing up to 35 square miles of coastland each year for the better part of a century. As erosion and rising seas have remade the state, entire communities have had to move. Climate migration, new to some parts of the world, is as much a fact of life for Louisianans as the changing of the tides.

Even as Louisiana has focused on reclaiming lost land and restoring coastal wetland, Owens has urged special attention to adaptation, teaching people in harms’ way how to adjust their ways of life without losing what’s most important to them. She works with the Bayou Culture Collaborative, which brings together tradition bearers from impacted communities to talk “about the human dimension of coastal land loss” so residents, and their elected leaders, can better plan for the migration already afoot. Research has shown that when people make the difficult decision to pack up and leave, most of them go only a few miles. 

“People from all over the coast are starting to leave and move inland,” Owens said. In the parlance of her field, the places they leave behind are “sending communities”; where they’re headed, “receiving communities” await them. Owens has begun to convene meetings online and in receiving communities to discuss cultural sensitivity to help people prepare for their new neighbors, knowing that migration can exacerbate class and racial tension. 

In the Louisiana folklife program’s ongoing “Sense of Place – And Loss” workshop series, Owens hosts discussions about the future of bayou traditions to collectively imagine what the near future might look like as the Gulf Coast changes. Artists, other tradition bearers, and community leaders are invited to envision how they might make their towns and counties more welcoming for climate migrants, and Owens assists them in developing concrete action plans. Such an effort includes having receiving communities inventory their cultural and economic resources to see what they can offer newcomers, invest in trauma-informed care for disaster survivors, and consider what they might need to make themselves ready to integrate newcomers.

The Louisiana state coastal protection and restoration authority has identified some towns that might have the capacity, and need, for more people; many of these places have the space but lack the social infrastructure to support the continuation of rural peoples’ foodways and artistic traditions. Though receiving communities may not be far away, those most vulnerable to displacement are often Indigenous, French-speaking, or otherwise culturally distinct, and moving even a short distance can expose them to unfamiliar circumstances. In her workshops, Owens is proposing ideas lifted in part from the adaptation strategies immigrants often rely upon, like cultural festivals and an emphasis on cultural exchange and language education. In a recent project, several coastal parishes (what Louisianans call counties) near Terrebonne created a collaborative quilt at a regional community festival as a way to draw attention to the beauty and ancestral importance of their wetlands and deepen their connections with one another.

That’s where Owens hopes folklorists can affect policy change, too. Owens is keeping a close eye on the state’s Coastal Master Plan, providing feedback with an eye towards supporting the culturally rich, and vanishing, coastal parishes. The Louisiana Folklore Society has urged the state to conduct its planning with respect to the desires and needs of the people who live on the coast, prioritizing engagement before any major mitigation project, and saving habitat not merely for its inherent value but also for its importance to the coastal tribes it sustains.

Though climate disasters have already thrown towns along the Louisiana coast and beyond into disarray and prompted seismic changes in how residents live, this is just the beginning. As floods and fires, droughts and erosion, and the myriad other impacts of a warming world wreak greater havoc, some of the answers to the crisis won’t be found in engineering or science, but in the cultural fabric that binds us together.


Katie Myers wrote this article for Grist.


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The Biden Administration is investing $50 million from the Inflation Reduction Act in Colorado to produce more batteries to power electric vehicles.

Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, said the state is bullish on EVs, in part because gas-powered vehicle tailpipes are a major contributor to harmful ground-level ozone and climate pollution.

"When you look at both our climate goals and just the pollution problems that we have in Denver and the Front Range, switching to electric vehicles just has huge benefits for our air quality and for our climate," Toor asserted.

The new funding will allow Thornton-based manufacturer Solid Power to add at least 40 new jobs, paying production operators, chemists and engineers nearly $78,000 a year on average. Solid Power is also partnering with area high schools and community colleges for job training programs.

After he purchased his own EV, Toor noted he started tracking his electric bills and found significant fuel-cost savings compared with gas-powered vehicles.

"It's the equivalent of me paying about 90 cents per gallon for gasoline," Toor explained. "They are incredibly convenient, I basically don't have to go to the gas station, I just plug in the vehicle when I get home and let it charge overnight."

Colorado supported Solid Power's early growth with an Advanced Industries Accelerator grant in 2014, which supports the development of early-stage technologies. Their new sulfide-based batteries are expected to provide more power and range for drivers and are safer and less costly than conventional lithium-ion technology. Toor emphasized battery-powered vehicles can also help lower electric bills for everyone.

"People primarily charge their electric vehicles overnight, when there is a lot of excess capacity on the grid," Toor pointed out. "It helps to keep everybody's electric rates affordable over time as we get more and more EVs on the grid."


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By Yessenia Funes for Atmos.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Jessica Celi has lived in the Bay Area for almost her entire life. She spent most of her 20s jumping from industry to industry, trying to find her place in the professional world. She returned to school to specialize in human resources and graduated last year. Then, she was laid off from her first job. That’s when she entered the clean energy job market.

Celi, 30, is just finishing up her 11-month program as a SolarCorps fellow in the Bay Area with GRID Alternatives, a national nonprofit that provides no-cost residential solar installations for eligible low-income households in various regions and also trains locals to provide the service. This year, the organization is expanding its yearslong partnership with the U.S.-run public service agency AmeriCorps to help launch the American Climate Corps, President Joe Biden’s initiative to train and deploy a diverse workforce to, among other things, work in sectors contributing to the clean energy transition. It’s an alternative to the promised Civilian Climate Corps that Democrats axed from his landmark climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed into law two years ago, and Celi is part of the inaugural class. 

“I am part of something bigger, and I do look forward to moving into a career throughout the long term in the renewable industry,” she said.

Two years after the Civilian Climate Corps died in Congress, groups like GRID Alternatives and the AmeriCorps are picking up the mantle to make the president’s vision of a new green workforce a reality. Corps members do all kinds of work—from restoring wetlands to managing forests—but the SolarCorps focuses on deploying solar panel technology in California, Colorado, and Washington D.C. to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions driving the planet’s warming. This year’s SolarCorps cohort at GRID Alternatives has installed solar for over 1,170 families. Since October 2023, the organization has orchestrated some 130 job placements. As the Inflation Reduction Act injects $370 billion toward the clean energy sector through tax credits, grants, and loans, the sector sees a rare opportunity for growth. 

The American Climate Corps includes private and public partners from across the country, from the U.S. Forest Service to Operation Fresh Start, a Wisconsin-based organization that helps young people find career pathways. While the Biden administration didn’t provide the American Climate Corps with its own budget to build this new workforce, the White House is directing agency dollars and grants to invest in AmeriCorps programs already molding the green jobs of tomorrow. 

Some organizations—like GRID Alternatives—are bringing renewable energy to communities of color, low-income communities, and other communities that have historically been excluded or disinvested. President Biden committed to distributing at least 40% of his federal investment benefits to these neighborhoods that need them the most. Programs like the SolarCorps are attempting to realize that goal.

SolarCorps has been working with AmeriCorps since 2006 long before climate became a national priority. Now, the program plans to expand to more states thanks to an infusion of new grant dollars GRID Alternatives secured from the Inflation Reduction Act. The organization has provided paid fellowships to over 300 individuals like Celi to learn how to install solar panels, as well as how to engage with the community.

Celi, for instance, was an outreach fellow. Her fellowship is now ending, but her role involved building a relationship with her Bay Area community by door-knocking, calling, or emailing families that already had their solar panels installed to help them monitor their systems and ensure they know how to use the panels. On Earth Day this year, when Biden kicked off the American Climate Corps, Celi was at Richmond, California’s Unity Park with the rest of GRID’s outreach team, as well as other local community partners, to attract the public to their programs. As Celi saw local families engage with the event’s free bike repairs and free bicycle-powered smoothies, she realized the scope of her work—and how impactful that was. 

“It really felt meaningful to see that we are directly connecting with the community and sharing these resources with one another,” she said. 

After all, Richmond is home to a refinery from fossil fuel polluter Chevron. The industrial facility has been a source of air pollution for the predominantly Hispanic, Black, and Asian community. This is, in part, why GRID has been focused on communities of color, explained Adewale OgunBadejo, vice president of workforce development at the organization. 

“How can we reduce the carbon footprint in the communities that we serve? How can we have less urban oil wells because they’re causing higher incidences and rates of cancer and asthma in these communities that we serve?” he said. “We’re helping our fellows make that environmental connection in a very real way so that as you’re installing and you’re looking at an urban drilling well across the street, you understand that the more solar we can install, the more of those we can remove and create more healthy communities.”

Black, Indigenous, and other people of color bear the brunt of air pollution health impacts from dirty energy sources. In 2023, a group of researchers even coined the term “fossil fuel racism” to highlight the insidious ways the industry harms Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor populations. Communities of color are also less likely than their white peers to have installed solar panels onto their roofs. That’s where GRID comes in: The program’s solar panel installations from this year’s fellows alone have cut carbon dioxide emissions by over 78,000 tons—or nearly 15,000 cars taken off the road. 

The SolarCorps program doesn’t only focus on bringing solar panels to people of color—it also prioritizes hiring this demographic as fellows, too. Among the past year’s 51 fellows, for instance, 80% identified as Black, Indigenous, or a person of color. Over half were women or nonbinary, 27% identified as LGBTQIA+, and some 26% have been affected by the justice system (mostly through incarceration). At the national level, the solar industry is dominated by white dudes: In 2022, 73% of the workforce was white and 69% male, according to an independent report. Celi, who is Filipino, experienced that diversity disparity firsthand when in January she attended her first industry conference, where, for the first time in her solar work, she was the minority. 

“I’m very proud to have been able to attend and to create that change,” said Celi, who is also a member of Women of Renewable Industries and Sustainable Energy, or WRISE, which is dedicated to cultivating women leaders in the industry.

The SolarCorps fellowship is just a tiny piece of the U.S. government’s wider American Climate Corps. Sociologist Dana Fisher, who is also the author of the book Saving Ourselves, has been researching the existing Corps programs that have been expanding and shifting to include climate change. Many of these adjustments were already in the works before the Biden administration’s formalization of the American Climate Corps. 

Despite the existence of the Climate Corps, there’s no central agency or database tracking the integration of climate change into programs across the U.S. or following the fellows themselves after they complete their service. How many wind up in clean energy jobs? Do they leave these programs with a deeper understanding of how the planet’s rapid warming disrupts society? Fisher’s research on AmeriCorps has so far illuminated the reality that “there is no consensus about how the agency is doing its climate work,” she wrote in a paper published last month. There’s no consistent language used across AmeriCorps programs and, thus, no unified understanding of the climate crisis among program participants and leadership.

Now, Fisher is following the rollout of a handful of programs in Vermont, Maryland, Michigan, and California where she has developed a climate-centric curriculum all of their American Climate Corps members will be required to take when their fellowships begin in September. She will be adding more states to the list later this year. 

Fisher emphasized the need for more federal dollars to go toward analyzing all the varied American Climate Corps programs to assess whether the funding is doing what it’s supposed to do: educating young people (especially young people of color) about the climate crisis and placing them in jobs dedicated to building a cleaner, healthier, more equitable world.

“The infusion of money is absolutely valuable, but it’s impossible for me not to think about this without putting on my social sciences hat,” Fisher said. “The problem is that we don’t know how they’re helping because nobody is actually measuring that, and nobody is there evaluating it.”

GRID’s SolarCorps doesn’t have its own evaluation system, either. The group is working to build that out now that it’s hired a data analyst, OgunBadejo said. They’re hoping to track fellows three to 12 months after they graduate. As the program looks to expand into tribal nations and nearly 30 states like Texas and Michigan over the next few years, OgunBadejo recognizes the need to partner with local groups that know those communities best and can cater the programs to their needs.

With the hundreds of millions of dollars in grants the group has collaboratively received from the Inflation Reduction Act, they plan to work with others and bring their SolarCorps model to even more communities across the country that need access to affordable solar energy and the training to find jobs in the industry, too.

“Our approach as an organization is very holistic,” OgunBadejo said. “We really look at clean energy as a way to address environmental and economic justice.”

For too long, Black and Brown folks have been left out of the clean energy boom. SolarCorps is building an ecosystem where community members have the skills they need to transform their communities for the better—and get paid to do it.


Yessenia Funes wrote this article for Atmos.


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By Keaton Peters for Inside Climate News.
Broadcast version by Freda Ross for Texas News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Months before the Texas Panhandle erupted with destructive wildfires, fire crews in Borger were igniting fire intentionally on a seven-mile, roughly 250-foot wide ribbon of land on the edge of town.

The prescribed burn in November removed dense grass and brush next to homes on the southwest side of the town. When the Windy Deuce fire ravaged the region in February, the prescribed burn area acted as a fireproof wall that stopped the blaze in its tracks.

"I would bet my next paycheck, if that black line had not been there, we would have lost homes and, it's quite possible, lives. There's no doubt in my mind," said Archie Stone, wildland fire coordinator for Borger, located 50 miles northeast of Amarillo. Stone is a state certified and insured burn manager in Texas and has spent decades fighting wildfires around the country.

The Windy Deuce fire burned an estimated 144,045 acres before it was contained. Nearby, the Smokehouse Creek fire burned more than a million acres as it became the largest wildfire in Texas history, decimating multiple counties and crossing into Oklahoma. At least two people died, hundreds of buildings burned and thousands of livestock were killed.

The region has seen fires throughout its history, with 90 percent of the largest wildfires in Texas recorded in the months between January and May, most of them in west Texas and the panhandle. After massive fires in 2006 claimed 12 lives, the Borger fire chief and city council looked for ways to protect their town. They turned to prescribed burning.

Before modern firefighting and fire suppression techniques, fires across forests and grasslands were a part of the Earth's natural cycles. Prescribed burning is an ancient technique still practiced by some Native Americans. In the range ecosystem that dominates the United States from the Texas panhandle through the Great Plains, land managers and firefighters are recommending prescribed burns to protect communities and restore natural fire cycles. But in Texas, prescribed burning has yet to be widely accepted.

Climate change continues to increase the wildfire risk in Texas, which is part of the region in the United States most affected by high temperatures and long dry spells. Climate scientists warn that the wildfire season in the state is likely to grow longer and more intense.

"We've had a trend of increasing temperatures in the state of Texas for several decades, and that trend is expected to continue," said John Nielsen-Gammon, the state climatologist and a professor at Texas A&M University.

Wildfires thrive in dry and windy conditions. More swelteringly hot days contribute to increased rates of evaporation. "Essentially, that means things dry out faster between rainfall," Nielsen-Gammon said. "That would tend to lengthen the period of time over the course of the year in which wildfire is possible."

Long dry and unseasonably hot periods are "where climate change comes in," said Katharine Hayhoe, a professor at Texas Tech University and chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy. "It's the difference between smaller, more easily contained fires, and really large out of control fires."

By 2050, the number of days with wildfire danger in Texas could increase by as many as 40 days per year, according to the Desert Research Institute at the University of Nevada at Reno. Its recent study analyzed a global climate model simulation and various wildfire danger indicators and found that high heat and dry periods will lengthen the wildfire season.

In the days leading up to this year's fires, temperatures in the region surpassed 80 degrees, with the cities of Amarillo and Borger measuring record-high temperatures for late February. The panhandle was not in drought, but higher temperatures quickly dried out tall grass. Then, the winds came.

The Smokehouse Creek fire spread from 40,000 acres on Feb 27 to more than 900,000 within two days. The fire began on Feb. 26 north of Stinnett, Texas. State officials are investigating the fire, but Xcel Energy, a major U.S. electric and natural gas company, has acknowledged that "its facilities appear to have been involved" in igniting the blaze.

From Stinnett, the fire headed east and burned about 80 percent of both Hemphill and Roberts counties. "It was a massive monster of a wildfire," said Andy Holloway, a former rancher in the small city of Canadian, Texas. He was among the lucky ones, with no damage to his home, land or cattle.

Holloway is the Hemphill County agent in agriculture and natural resources for the Texas A&M Agrilife Extension. He said a wet spring and summer in 2023 brought about enormous grass growth. "Dry dead grass in the winter is like standing gasoline," Holloway said. "All it needed was a spark."

Eastern red cedars add to the risk. The trees, native to the Great Plains, were planted intentionally in Texas to control normal wind patterns but now provide ready tinder for fast-spreading fires.

Former wildland firefighter Morgan Treadwell works as a range specialist for the Texas A&M Agrilife Extension and she is an advocate for prescribed burns. Among the wildfire risk factors of fuel, wind and dryness, "the one that we can manage is fuel loads," said Treadwell, who is also an associate professor at Texas A&M University. "We can do that with livestock and we can do that with fire."

Texas state law protects the right of private landowners to ignite fires on their own land when a burn ban is not in effect. Certified and insured burn managers are typically hired to conduct burns, and they are allowed to use prescribed fire during a burn ban. Landowners or any burn managers they hire can be liable for harm if a fire they start enters and scorches someone else's land. Liability remains even if no crops or structures are damaged.

Certified burn managers are trained to monitor weather and wind conditions and to evaluate if the land has become dangerously dry. They also survey the land and plan how to use natural firebreaks to help contain the burn. But "weather is the most unpredictable factor in all of this," Tradwell said, noting that prescribed burning comes with an inherent risk.

The seven-mile prescribed burn near Borger was located on the Four Sixes Ranch, which was a willing partner with the city. But Texas landowners generally are cautious if not reluctant toward prescribed burns.

"People are scared to use a tool like controlled burning for fear they'll be sued," Holloway said, adding that "there's been a few people that have really been heavy handed" filing or threatening lawsuits.

Treadwell agreed that ranching culture is divided over prescribed burns. "Some neighbors can get pretty hateful when it comes to one neighbor burning and the other neighbor not wanting it," she said.

The Texas A&M Forest Service helps fight fires that overwhelm local departments. It has authority to conduct prescribed burns in state forests, although land in Texas is overwhelmingly owned by individuals and private corporations. The forest service offers reimbursements to qualifying landowners who do prescribed burns, but owners bear the upfront cost and legal liability.

Karen Stafford, a wildfire prevention program coordinator for the forest service, said the city of Borger "set the bar high in showing the effectiveness of prescribed burns and what it can do in community protection."

Stone, who now oversees Borger's wildlands, said public engagement on prescribed burning has been crucial. Stone, who joined the fire department there in 2011, said fire personnel continue to personally visit houses near future burn areas and distribute pamphlets with information and a phone number to call with questions. He said the department works hard to engage and meet with residents, the city council and the mayor before starting new prescribed burns. "Now people don't even think twice," he said. "We put out notifications, and they know they're going to see some smoke in the air. They understand why we're doing it."

The Texas A&M Forest Service also encourages cities and counties to develop community wildfire protection plans that identify ways to lower wildfire risk and to protect lives and structures. As of this month, only three municipalities-including the city of Borger-and two counties in the Texas Panhandle have a community wildfire protection plan.

The state forest service's wildfire protection plan contains no mention of climate change, rising temperatures or heat. Stafford would not comment on global climate change as a factor in the state's wildfire plans. The forest service publishes quarterly wildfire outlook reports as well as daily assessments based on actual weather conditions at more than 150 stations across the state.

The wildfire outlook report published in December for the "dormant" season of winter and early spring predicted "fire season will be normal to below normal."

As climate change spurs more days of hot dry weather, the months and weeks of ideal conditions for prescribed burns will shorten. Still, after a historically destructive 2024 wildfire season, the success of Borger's prescribed burn has generated interest in that mitigation technique.

In the town of Canadian, Holloway knows ranchers who have lost everything and he thinks residents across Texas may "reconsider" their aversion to prescribed burns.

"Fire is a good tool to use," he said. "I think this is a big wake up call."


Keaton Peters wrote this article for Inside Climate News.


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