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Sixteen months had passed since Hurricane Harvey tore through the Texas coast in August 2017, killing more than 80 people and flattening entire neighborhoods. And when Texas lawmakers gathered in Austin for their biennial session, the scale of the storm’s destruction was hard to ignore.

Legislators responded by greenlighting a yearslong statewide initiative to evaluate flood risks and improve preparedness for increasingly frequent and deadly storms. “If we get our planning right on the front end and prevent more damage on the front end, then we have less on the back end,” Charles Perry, a Republican senator from Lubbock who chairs a committee overseeing environmental issues, said at the time.

In the years that followed, hundreds of local officials and volunteers canvassed communities across Texas, mapping out vulnerabilities. The result of their work came in 2024 with the release of Texas’ first-ever state flood plan.

Their findings identified nearly $55 billion in proposed projects and outlined 15 key recommendations, including nine suggestions for legislation. Several were aimed at aiding rural communities like Kerr County, where flash flooding over the Fourth of July weekend killed more than 100 people. Three are still missing.

But this year, lawmakers largely ignored those recommendations.

Instead, the legislative session that ended June 2 was dominated by high-profile battles over school vouchers and lawmakers’ decision to spend $51 billion to maintain and provide new property tax cuts, an amount nearly equal to the funding identified by the Texas Water Development Board, a state agency that has historically overseen water supply and conservation efforts.

Although it had been only seven years since Hurricane Harvey, legislators now prioritized the state’s water and drought crisis over flooding needs.

Legislators allocated more than $1.6 billion in new revenue for water infrastructure projects, only some of which would go toward flood mitigation. They also passed a bill that will ask voters in November to decide whether to approve $1 billion annually over the next two decades that would prioritize water and wastewater over flood mitigation projects. At that pace, water experts said that it could take decades before existing mitigation needs are addressed — even without further floods.

Even if they had been approved by lawmakers this year, many of the plan’s recommendations would not have been implemented before the July 4 disaster. But a ProPublica and Texas Tribune analysis of legislative proposals, along with interviews with lawmakers and flood experts, found that the Legislature has repeatedly failed to enact key measures that would help communities prepare for frequent flooding.

Such inaction often hits rural and economically disadvantaged communities hardest because they lack the tax base to fund major flood prevention projects and often cannot afford to produce the data they need to qualify for state and federal grants, environmental experts and lawmakers said.

Over the years, legislators have declined to pass at least three bills that would create siren or alert systems, tools experts say can be especially helpful in rural communities that lack reliable internet and cell service. A 2019 state-commissioned report estimated flood prevention needs at over $30 billion. Since then, lawmakers have allocated just $1.4 billion. And they ignored the key recommendations from the state’s 2024 flood plan that are meant to help rural areas like Kerr County, which is dubbed “Flash Flood Alley” due to its geography.

Spokespeople for Gov. Greg Abbott and House Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, did not answer questions about why the plan’s recommendations were overlooked but defended the Legislature’s investment in flood mitigation as significant. They pointed to millions more spent on other prevention efforts, including flood control dam construction and maintenance, regional flood projects, and increased floodplain disclosures and drainage requirements for border counties. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick did not respond to questions.

This week, the Legislature will convene for a special session that Abbott called to address a range of priorities, including flood warning systems, natural disaster preparation and relief funding. Patrick promised that the state would purchase warning sirens for counties in flash flood zones. Similar efforts, however, have previously been rejected by the Legislature. Alongside Burrows, Patrick also announced the formation of committees on disaster preparedness and flooding and called the move “just the beginning of the Legislature looking at every aspect of this tragic event.” Burrows said the House is “ready to better fortify our state against future disasters.”

But Rep. Ana-María Rodríguez Ramos, a Democrat from Richardson, near Dallas, said state lawmakers have brushed off dire flood prevention needs for decades.

“The manual was there, and we ignored it, and we've continued to ignore these recommendations,” said Rodríguez Ramos, who has served on the House Natural Resources Committee overseeing water issues for three sessions. “It’s performative to say we’re trying to do something knowing well we’re not doing enough.”

One recommendation from the 2024 flood plan would have cost the state nothing to enact. It called for granting counties the authority to levy drainage fees, including in unincorporated areas, that could fund local flood projects. Only about 150 of 1,450 Texas cities and counties have dedicated drainage fees, according to a study cited in the state assessment.

Kerr, a conservative county of 53,000 people, has struggled to gain support for projects that would raise taxes. About a week after the flooding, some residents protested when county commissioners discussed a property tax increase to help cover the costs of recovery efforts.

The inability to raise such fees is one of the biggest impediments for local governments seeking to fund flood mitigation projects, said Robert R. Puente, a Democrat and former state representative who once chaired the state committee responsible for water issues. Lawmakers’ resistance to such efforts is rooted in fiscal conservatism, said Puente, who now heads the San Antonio Water System.

“It’s mostly because of a philosophy that the leadership in Austin has right now, that under no circumstances are we going to raise taxes, and under most circumstances we’re not even going to allow local governments to have control over how they raise taxes or implement fees,” he said.

Another one of the flood plan’s recommendations called for lawmakers to allocate money for a technical assistance program to help underresourced and rural governments better manage flood prone areas, which requires implementing a slew of standards to ensure safe development in those hazardous zones. Doing this work requires local officials to collect accurate mapping that shows the risk of flooding. Passing this measure could have helped counties like Kerr with that kind of data collection, which the plan recognized is especially challenging for rural and economically disadvantaged communities.

Insufficient information impacts Texas’s ability to fully understand flood risks statewide. The water board’s plan, for example, includes roughly 600 infrastructure projects across Texas in need of completion. But its report acknowledged that antiquated or missing data meant another 3,100 assessments would be required to know whether additional projects are needed.

In the Guadalupe River region, which includes Kerr County, 65% of areas lacked adequate flood mapping. Kerrville, the county seat, was listed among the areas identified as having the “greatest known flood risks and mitigation needs.” Yet of the 19 flood needs specific to the city and county, only three were included in the state plan’s list of 600. They included requests to install backup generators in critical facilities and repair low-water crossings, which are shallow points in streets where rainwater can pool to dangerous levels.

At least 16 other priorities, including the county’s desire for an early warning flood system and potential dam or drainage system repairs, required a follow-up evaluation, according to the state plan. County officials tried to obtain grants for the early warning systems for years, to no avail.

Gonzales County, an agriculture-rich area of 20,000 people along the Guadalupe River, is among the rural communities struggling to obtain funding, said emergency management director Jimmy Harless, who is also the county’s fire marshal. The county is in desperate need of a siren system and additional gauges to measure the river’s potentially dangerous flood levels, Harless said, but doesn’t have the resources, personnel or expertise to apply for the “burdensome” state grant process.

“It is extremely frustrating for me to know that there’s money there and there’s people that care, but our state agency has become so bureaucratic that it’s just not feasible for us,” Harless said. “Our folks’ lives are more important than what some bureaucrat wants us to do.”

For years, Texas leaders have focused more on cleaning up after disasters than on preparing for them, said Jim Blackburn, a professor at Rice University specializing in environmental law and flooding issues.

“It’s no secret that the Guadalupe is prone to flash flooding. That’s been known for decades,” Blackburn said. “The state has been very negligent about kind of preparing us for, frankly, the worst storms of the future that we are seeing today because of climate change, and what’s changing is that the risks are just greater today and will be even greater tomorrow, because our storms are getting worse and worse.”

At a news conference this month, Abbott said state committees would investigate “ways to address this,” though he declined to offer specifics. When pressed by a reporter about where the blame for the lack of preparedness should fall, Abbott responded that it was “the word choice of losers.”

It shouldn’t have taken the Hill Country flooding for a special session addressing emergency systems and funding needs, said Usman Mahmood, a policy analyst at Bayou City Waterkeeper, a Houston nonprofit that advocates for flood protection measures.

“The worst part pretty much already happened, which is the flooding and the loss of life,” he said. “Now it’s a reaction to that.”

Misty Harris contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Lexi Churchill and Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

He’s seen it serve as an economic lifeline for small farmers, especially the state’s poultry producers who operate on thin profit margins.

But the program, known as REAP, has faced a series of setbacks under the Trump administration. Nearly $1 billion in funding was frozen for months, farmers have heard nothing about applications filed last fall — and now a window for new applications that was supposed to open July 1 was closed at the last minute.

Meanwhile, the most common use case for REAP grants, helping farmers install solar, is under direct threat from the administration. A recent U.S. Department of Agriculture document outlining its Make Agriculture Great Again agenda says that, going forward, REAP ​“will disincentivize funding for solar panels on productive farmland.”

The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act infused REAP with over $2 billion, but those funds will soon run out, meaning the program will likely revert to the lower funding level of $50 million per year ensured by the current iteration of the federal Farm Bill.

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“We’re not looking at an IRA-like opportunity for REAP again any time soon,” said Lloyd Ritter, founder of the clean-energy policy consultancy Green Capitol. He helped draft the original REAP program as senior counsel for former Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa).

A slowdown in REAP funding would be a blow to the thousands of American farmers who use the program nationwide, forcing them to spend more money to meet their energy needs. And the efforts to block REAP funds from solar projects in particular would both stymie the growth of clean energy in rural areas and hamper what’s become a key source of income for farmers.

“This program has been key to helping people who don’t have a lot of assets make a change and provide some cash flow for their family,” said Everly, who has assisted with REAP grants to turn manure into biofuel, grow vegetables year-round in indoor enclosures, and add ​“desperately needed” energy efficiency to poultry barns.

A boon and bust

The 2002 Farm Bill created the program now known as REAP; it was given its current name under the 2008 Farm Bill.

For more than two decades, the program has offered loan guarantees and grants to farmers and rural small businesses, as well as doled out grants to organizations that provide applicants with technical assistance.

Under the Farm Bill, REAP grants reimbursed recipients for up to a quarter of a project’s cost. The IRA increased reimbursement to up to 50 percent of a project’s cost.

USDA data shows that more than $1 billion in IRA REAP funding was awarded in over 6,800 grants to farmers and rural small businesses between fiscal year 2023 and the first quarter of fiscal year 2025, according to an analysis by the Environmental Law & Policy Center, with 80 percent of the grants going to Republican House districts.

Congress allocated IRA funds for REAP applications through 2031, though the funding will likely run out long before then. Federal data shows that about half of IRA REAP funds have already been obligated.

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President Donald Trump froze over $911 million in REAP funds with his Day 1 executive order targeting IRA programs. His administration lifted the freeze in late March and has yet to make another attempt at clawing back already-promised IRA REAP funds, as some advocates had feared would happen — especially for solar projects.

Nonetheless, farmers and experts who monitor the program wonder whether expected grant payments will be disbursed or new applications accepted in coming months, and whether farmers will still trust the program after this period of chaos. 

REAP grants are administered through reimbursement, meaning uncertainty is particularly harmful. Farmers and other recipients make significant up-front investments with their own money under the assumption that the government will honor its commitment to pay them back.

“This year, since Jan. 20, has been incredible levels of stress for people who did not understand if they would ever get paid for work where they have already put down millions of dollars on projects,” said Everly.

“No matter what the government does, the harvest happens at the same time every year. Farmers had made investments with hope of help from the government, and there’s great uncertainty right now.”

A window closed

On June 30, the USDA released a statement saying that the fiscal year 2026 REAP application period that was supposed to run from July 1 to Sept. 30 would not happen.

“This decision was made due to the overwhelming response and continued popularity of the program resulting in a backlog of applicants,” the brief statement says. The USDA said it ​“anticipates” accepting applications again starting Oct. 1.

Meanwhile, the agency has yet to announce decisions on applications submitted last fall, farmers and the advocates who help them with REAP applications told Canary Media. Usually, farmers and technical assistance organizations feel fairly confident that a strong proposal will receive an award, and many made plans expecting to receive funding, Everly said. Now, they are unsure.

REAP only reimburses projects that were started after the application was submitted, so many farmers planning to apply this round had postponed breaking ground on projects until after July 1, Everly said. But with the sudden delay, they must now choose to either move forward without REAP funding or kick needed upgrades down the road once more.

The number of REAP award decisions is indeed down significantly this year, according to an analysis by the Environmental Law & Policy Center. Federal data obtained by the group through a public records request shows the USDA obligated money for just over 1,900 grant and loan guarantees between the start of this fiscal year and July 9; almost 2,400 obligations were made during the same period last year. While the money awarded for grants so far this year is only slightly less than last year, the dollars for loan guarantees are drastically lower.

Everly was hired by the Indiana state government to help farmers file REAP applications in the program’s early days, then founded a firm now staffed by his wife and more than a dozen employees.

His company, EIM LLC, had seven people working full time on REAP applications over the past three months in anticipation of the July 1 application window. They only get paid once projects come to fruition. REAP data from the USDA shows that the company was awarded five grants for $100,000 each in fiscal year 2023, but has received only about $25,000 thus far.

Everly said his firm has a 92 percent success rate in applications, so the wait for payment is not usually a problem. But now he’s uncertain if the 3,000 hours of staff time spent on this latest round of applications will ever be compensated.

“We don’t know if we’ll ever get paid for any of the work we did,” said Everly, whose family also owns two farms in the state, one going back seven generations. He said his firm can survive the possible financial setback, but many farmers are working on tighter margins. ​“We’ve helped a lot of people who really need the help” from REAP funds.

A rollercoaster

The canceled July application window was just the latest disruption in what’s been a chaotic year for REAP.

On March 26, USDA sent a cryptic letter to REAP and other rural agriculture grant recipients noting that the funding freeze was over, and they had 30 days to ​“voluntarily” alter their applications to remove ​“any harmful [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility] project features” or to use ​“more affordable and effective energy sources.” The letter indicated grants would be paid even without changes.

Amanda Pankau, director of energy and community resiliency at the environmental nonprofit Prairie Rivers Network, said REAP recipients her organization works with in Illinois were alarmed by the freeze and then confused by the letter, especially since switching to an energy source other than solar wasn’t an option, and most projects did not have DEIA components. Indeed, federal data shows that over the past decade, 82 percent of REAP grants went to recipients identified as white, and 75 percent went to men or businesses owned by men.

“The federal freeze and policy chaos, including the confusion surrounding the March 26 letter, created real distress for Illinois’ farmers and rural small businesses,” Pankau said. ​“We know that rural farmers and small business owners are already managing intense stress and thin profit margins. Many don’t have the privilege of a financial cushion to absorb months of federal uncertainty for clean energy projects that were already awarded or underway.”

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In mid-April, a federal judge ruled that the USDA must pay out billions of dollars promised under the IRA, including from REAP and other clean energy programs such as Empowering Rural America, Powering Affordable Clean Energy, and Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities.

The following week, on April 25, three congressional Democrats from Minnesota — Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, along with Rep. Angie Craig — sent a letter to the USDA demanding answers about REAP funds that appeared to still be frozen.

The tumult has had lasting impacts on farmers, technical assistance organizations, and solar developers, multiple sources told Canary Media.

“People are being whipsawed out there, who are just trying to use the program to install clean energy and cut energy waste,” said Andy Olsen, senior policy advocate for the Environmental Law & Policy Center.

Tim Biello is the owner and manager of Featherbed Lane Farm, a regenerative farm supplying community-supported agriculture in upstate New York. He learned in January that he had received REAP funding for a 30-kilowatt, $115,000 solar project. After the freeze, he wondered whether he should really start the project, since he can’t afford it without REAP reimbursement.

“I got awarded, which was awesome news,” said Biello in May. ​“Then we got the notice it was frozen. The solar company was just about to put a $50,000 to $75,000 order for panels. We canceled that; the advice was not to proceed unless you can take it on with no reimbursement.”

Biello said at the time that he assumed he would get the promised payment, ​“but I don’t feel like anything now is guaranteed, even if you have a signed contract with the government.”

Ultimately, Biello decided to install the solar project this summer, after learning the funds were unfrozen and consulting with advisers. In early July, he could finally take a breath of relief: The USDA officially reimbursed him.

Farmers in Iowa have similar trepidation, according to Mike Brummer, sales manager at Eagle Point Solar, an installer that counts REAP grantees among its customers.

“We’re at this point trying to treat it as business as usual. Let’s keep talking about the project, moving forward with the necessary items,” Brummer said. ​“I joke I’ll check my Twitter account at 2 a.m. for an update.”

He said many farmers can only do solar projects with the help of REAP.

“The REAP grant can make or break a project, especially for a small farmer or small business,” he said. ​“For farmers, every penny has a name on it before it hits the bank. The more pennies you can save, the more chance you have of enduring as a farm and being able to go to the next generation.”

The future

Everly has three wishes for REAP going forward: clarity on the status of application windows and the program’s future; full funding through the Farm Bill, so that 50 percent reimbursement can continue; and staff support from the USDA.

“Is it 25 percent or 50 percent [reimbursement], and are the application deadlines real or imaginary?” he said.

With sweeping cuts to the federal workforce, it can be hard to reach someone in the USDA with questions or concerns about the program or an application, he added.

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Given the turmoil of the past six months, Everly and others are worried that farmers won’t trust REAP as a resource even if the USDA takes applications again. Everly noted that the average farmer only has about 40 harvest seasons in their life, and with so many resources sunk into each season, they can’t afford to take many risks.

“Any time you create uncertainty,” farmers will be dissuaded, he said. ​“They only get to run this experiment 40 times in their life. If you messed up two of them, it’s hard to get their faith back. One mistake and you’ve lost multiple generations of wealth.”

Ritter at Green Capitol shares Everly’s concern about federal layoffs impacting REAP. In May, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told lawmakers that the USDA was trying to fill critical positions after more than 15,000 agency employees took buyouts aimed at reducing the federal workforce.

“My biggest fear is the staffing cuts at USDA will hurt program implementation and efficiency and speed,” Ritter said. 

He emphasized the bipartisan support that REAP has long enjoyed, and said he hopes and expects that popularity will help the program weather tough times.

“REAP just makes sense,” said Ritter. ​“The vast bulk of applicants are farmers, ranchers, [and] rural small businesses using it to help lower energy costs and build energy dominance in rural America. Despite unfair and unreasonable attacks from the far right, I think REAP will be OK.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline USDA abruptly cancels rural energy grant application window on Jul 17, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kari Lydersen.

But while this is the first real taste of extreme heat for Northeastern cities, parts of the country like Texas have been cooking since May. Alaska this month issued its first-ever heat advisory. Forecasters expect more above-average temperatures through the summer.

Summers are indeed getting hotter, a consequence of the warming planet. As the climate heats up, the frequency and intensity of heat waves is increasing and their timing is changing, arriving earlier in the season.

But the damage from extreme heat isn’t spread out evenly, and the more dangerous effects to people are not necessarily found in the hottest places. High temperatures often lead to more emergencies and hospital visits when they represent a big jump from a place’s average, which means ordinarily cooler regions tend to suffer the worst harm from heat. That includes places like Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, where temperatures rarely climb higher than 80 degrees Fahrenheit and most homes don’t have air-conditioning.

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Now researchers have found that rural areas may suffer more under extreme heat than previously thought. A report from Headwaters Economics and the Federation of American Scientists found that more than half of rural ZIP codes in the United States, which includes some 11.5 million Americans, have “high” heat vulnerability, a consequence not just of temperatures but unique risk factors that occur far outside of major cities.The thermometers thus do not tell the whole story about who is likely to suffer from extreme heat — nor do the images, which tend to come from sweltering cities. But understanding the factors that worsen the harm of rising temperatures could help save lives.

What makes the countryside so vulnerable to extreme heat

The discussion around the geography of extreme heat tends to focus on the urban heat island effect. The concrete, asphalt, steel, and glass of dense urban areas act as a sponge for the sun’s rays. Air pollution from cars, trucks, furnaces, and factories helps trap warmer temperatures over cities, and that hotter air, in turn, accelerates the formation of pollutants like ozone. On a hot summer day, a city center can be 25 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the surrounding regions. And with so many people squeezed into these metropolitan ovens, it adds up to a massive health burden from extreme heat.

But far outside of downtowns, where homes and buildings get farther and farther apart, rural regions face their own long-running challenges that exacerbate the dangers of extreme heat.

A major factor: the median age of the rural population is older than in cities. That matters, because on a physiological level, older adults struggle more to cope with heat than the young. People living in rural communities also have double the rates of chronic health conditions that enhance the damage from heat like high blood pressure and emphysema compared to people living in urban ZIP codes.

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Rural infrastructure is another vulnerability. While there may be more forests and farms in the country that can cool the air, the buildings there are often older, with less adequate insulation and cooling systems for this new era of severe heat. Manufactured and mobile homes, more common in rural areas, are particularly sensitive to heat. In Arizona’s Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, mobile homes make up 5 percent of the housing stock but account for 30 percent of indoor heat deaths.

Even if rural residents have air conditioners and fans, they tend to have lower incomes and thus devote a higher share of their spending for electricity, up to 40 percent more than city dwellers, which makes it less affordable for them to stay cool. That’s if they can get electricity at all: Rural areas are more vulnerable to outages due to older infrastructure and the long distances that power lines have to be routed, creating greater chances of problems like tree branches falling on lines. According to the US Census Bureau, 35.4 percent of households in rural areas experienced an outage over the course of a year, compared to 22.8 percent of households in urban areas.

Sparsely populated communities also have fewer public spaces, such as shopping malls and libraries, where people can pass a hot summer day. Rural economies also depend more on outdoor labor, and there are still no federal workplace heat regulations. Farmworkers, construction crews, and delivery drivers are especially vulnerable to hot weather, and an average of 40 workers die each year from extreme heat.

The health infrastructure is lacking as well. “There is a longstanding healthcare crisis in rural areas,” said Grace Wickerson, senior manager for climate and health at the Federation of American Scientists. There aren’t always nearby clinics and hospitals that can quickly treat heat emergencies. “To really take care of someone when they’re actually in full-on heat stroke, they need to be cooled down in a matter of minutes,” Wickerson said.

The Phoenix Fire Department has now started using ice immersion for heat stroke victims when transporting patients to hospitals to buy precious time. But rural emergency responders are less likely to have tools like this in their ambulances. “In Montana, which has not traditionally seen a lot of extreme heat, you would not have those tools on your truck and not have that awareness to do that cooling. When you see someone who has to also then travel miles to get care, that’s going to worsen their health related outcomes,” Wickerson said.

Emergency response times are generally much longer in rural areas, sometimes extending more than 25 minutes. People also have lower incomes and lower rates of insurance far from cities. Hospitals in rural areas are closing down as well. So when severe heat sets in, rural healthcare systems can get overwhelmed easily.Looking at data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Census Bureau, Wickerson and her collaborators mapped out how all these underlying factors are converging with extreme heat. They found that 59 percent of urban ZIP codes and 54 percent of rural ZIP codes are highly vulnerable to extreme heat as defined by the CDC’s Heat and Health Index, meaning they are much more likely to see health problems from extreme heat. So while rural areas may be cooler, the people living there face heat dangers comparable to those in much hotter cities, and geographically, they cover a much wider expanse of the country.

So while temperatures out in the sticks may not climb to the same peaks they do in downtowns, urban heat islands are surrounded by an ocean of rural heat vulnerabilities.

There’s no easy path to cooling off

There are ways to reduce the dangers of scorching weather across vast swaths of the country, but they aren’t fast or cheap. They require big upgrades to infrastructure — more robust energy delivery, more shade and green spaces, better insulation, cool roofs, and more energy-efficient cooling.

Countering extreme heat also requires bigger structural investments to reverse the ongoing rural healthcare crisis where a doctor shortage, hospital closures, and longer emergency response times are converging. But the Republican budget proposal will do the opposite, cutting healthcare access for millions of Americans that would, in turn, lead to dozens of hospitals closing down, mainly in rural areas.

Protecting people from dangerous heat also demands policy changes. Most states don’t have any worker protections on the books for extreme heat. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is in the process of creating the first federal heat safety standard for employers, requiring them to give employees breaks, water, and shade when it gets hot. But it’s not clear how strong the final regulation will be given that the Trump administration has been working to weaken rules across the board.

Cities and local governments could also impose rules that prevent utilities from shutting off power to customers during heat waves, similar to regulations that limit heat shutoffs during the winter.

But there are limits to how much people can adapt to hotter temperatures. Even places with a long history of managing heat are seeing more deaths and hospitalizations as relentless temperatures continue to mount. That means curbing the ongoing warming trend has to be part of the solution as well, reducing greenhouse gas emissions to slow climate change.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline It’s not just the cities. Extreme heat is a growing threat to rural America. on Jun 28, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Umair Irfan, Vox.

On a weeknight last October, Shelhorse got a call: The land that had been in her family for generations was set to be destroyed. Plans were underway for a 2,200-acre gas-powered data center campus that, if approved by the county’s Board of Supervisors, would be the largest in Virginia and the second-largest in the U.S. 

The initial proposal, made by Balico, LLC, a company based just outside of Washington, D.C., in Herndon, Virginia, included plans for 84 warehouse-sized data center buildings and a 3,500-megawatt power plant fueled by natural gas. Balico’s initial application also requested to rezone 14 parcels of land it had purchased from landowners, which were zoned for agricultural and rural residential use. 

“People went into panic mode,” said Amanda Wydner, a lifelong Pittsylvania County resident who was on the other end of the line with Shelhorse, her neighbor and friend. “It appeared that it truly was going to swallow up a region and create a patchwork-quilt style of development.”

Northern Virginia has been dubbed the “Data Center Capital of the World,” with 507 data centers located north of Richmond, Virginia, a higher concentration than in any other state or country. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is driving a sharp increase in power demand from data centers, which are critical for powering the large language models on which the technology is built. These giant buildings house the computers and servers necessary to store and send information, and they can consume millions of gallons of water each day. 

Domestic power demand from data centers is expected to double or triple by 2028 compared to 2023 levels, per a December 2024 U.S. Department of Energy report. In Virginia, developers seeking to bring new facilities online are venturing beyond the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area to rural communities in the southern part of the state. There, land comes at a lower cost than up north, making it attractive for building campuses with thousand-acre footprints. 

The push to develop data centers in rural areas is a growing trend across the country, particularly in the Southeast. Recently, proposed data center campuses in Bessemer, Alabama; Davis, West Virginia; and Oldham County, Kentucky, have all drawn local opposition. A common thread is developers limiting public access to information about the projects.

For Pittsylvania County’s Shelhorse and Wydner, these stories are all too familiar — and frustrating. Shelhorse remembers what it felt like when she first got the phone call from Wydner. “It made me angry,” said Shelhorse. “It seems like people from the north are trying to scout the southern communities because they’ve run out of land.”

That anger breeds resistance among rural communities facing similar challenges across the U.S. But grassroots opposition isn’t always successful. 

In southern Virginia, however, thanks to the efforts of Wydner, Shelhorse, and a few others determined to preserve the quality of life they say is rooted in their landscape, Pittsylvania’s local government rejected Balico’s request to rezone the land for data centers back in April 2025. The county then barred the company, which owns the land, from submitting another request until the spring of 2026.

The move comes after a monthslong struggle between residents and the developer, one that involved support from attorneys at the Southern Environmental Law Center and air pollution researchers at Harvard University. While the decision feels like a success for those who opposed the development, Shelhorse cautions that the struggle isn’t over.

“We won the battle, but not the war,” she said. Within that battle, though, lies a roadmap for others who could find themselves facing off with developers seeking to build vast complexes that border — or slice right through — rural communities. 

‘Get in the fight early’

To begin with, Wydner and Shelhorse said it’s critical to get in the fight early. They encouraged other rural communities to keep tabs on their local government, since that’s often where decisions happen. 

“Engagement in local government is imperative,” Wydner said. “If we had pulled back in any way, there’s a possibility that the Board would not have felt our opposition with such ferocity. But we never pulled back. We were very, very consistent.”

Two days after Shelhorse and Wydner’s phone call last October, they were joined by two dozen others at the county’s Community Development Office on October 18, 2024, to review maps and details about the proposed project. Wydner, whose family farmland also dates back generations, assembled the group after spotting a request in the local newspaper to rezone the county’s agricultural and residential land to accommodate 33 million square feet of data centers. 

A county meeting to approve that request was scheduled for November 4. The opposition coalesced around Wydner shortly after the meeting at the Community Development Office. The group ordered yard signs opposing the development, organized meetings, and began researching Balico, the developer.

About a week later, 250 people crowded into Mill Creek Community Church, located on the edge of the proposed development, to strategize about their opposition. Kathy Stump was among the residents at the meeting. Like the church, Stump’s property was also in close proximity to the proposed data centers. 

She lives along a windy two-lane road that was to be the primary transport route during construction. Far from being a major thoroughfare, Stump described having to pull to the side of the road to allow the milk trucks that frequent it to pass. 

“I know there are needs for this, but there’s also places for these things,” said Stump. “There are industrial parks that these things need to go in — they don’t need to go up against homes and in residential areas.” 

The land in Balico’s proposal was once at the heart of Pittsylvania County’s dairy industry. Landowners were approached by Balico as early as December 2023, and by the summer of 2024, contracts had been signed and the land exchanged hands. Nondisclosure agreements mean the exact offers made to landowners are not public, but residents estimate landowners were given double or triple the county’s typical per-acre value.

Between the Mill Creek Church gathering at the end of October and the November 4 meeting, the burgeoning local opposition held multiple events to spread the word about the data centers. Then, on the night of November 3, Balico pulled their proposal from the county’s consideration. 

The developer came back with an amended version of their initial proposal a few weeks later. This time, Balico wanted to build 12 data centers on over 750 acres. The plans to build a 3,500-megawatt gas-fired power plant and rezone all of the land they’d purchased were unchanged. The group of concerned residents was wary. 

“Right there in the rezoning was the open canvas for the 3,500-megawatt power plant,” said Wydner. “I hate to frame it as a game, but it almost became that way, like, ‘Hey, what can we get done to open the door to the big picture here? What can we get done to carve out this entire region as our own, personal, industrial mega-park?’”

By the end of 2024, Wydner and several others had connected with attorneys from the Southern Environmental Law Center, or SELC, an environmental legal advocacy organization in the South, for help.

The dirty truth about natural gas

Before Balico came along, “gas” was hardly a dirty word in Pittsylvania County. So when development plans included a proposal for a 3,500-megawatt gas-fired power plant, Wydner said that few alarm bells went off in the community, which she described as “solid red on voting day.” 

“Most of us see broadcasts and commercials that speak to gas energy as clean energy, when, in fact, it’s cleaner than coal, but it is not necessarily clean energy,” she said.

But, as Wydner and the rest of the local opposition would soon come to understand, a gas-fired power plant of the scale that Balico was proposing would have significant public health implications. Shortly after SELC got involved, researchers from the Dominici Lab at Harvard University’s School of Public Health went to work mapping the plant’s expected emissions of a particularly dangerous pollutant called fine particulate matter. No level of exposure to this kind of pollutant is safe, yet the researchers found that more than 1.2 million residents would face some amount of pollution across the Virginia-North Carolina line.

In Pittsylvania County, around 17,500 people, or more than 1 in 4 county residents, would face levels of exposure associated with increased hospitalizations due to heart attack, pneumonia, cardiovascular issues, and, in severe cases, stroke or cancer. 

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Keri Powell is SELC’s Air Program leader and an expert on the Clean Air Act, which regulates the emission of several criteria pollutants, including fine particulate matter. Powell, who was not one of the attorneys on the Balico case, said that even with the most stringent class of air pollution permit that Balico would need to operate, the gas plant would still emit the pollutants.  

“Fine particulate matter is deadly,” said Powell. “It’s one of the worst of all the criteria pollutants to be exposed to.”

The Harvard researchers also modeled costs associated with the plant’s increased risk to public health. They found that, if built, Balico’s gas plant could result in upwards of $31 million in additional annual health care costs, increasing to $48 million annually by 2040. Put together, that’s more than $625 million in cumulative health care costs by 2040. 

Including the public health costs associated with Balico’s development provided a counterbalance to the estimated revenue and tax benefits in the company’s proposal to the Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors, said Elizabeth Putfark, an SELC attorney who represented the concerned residents. 

“What’s missing, especially when there’s a gas plant involved, are the incredible costs that come along with it, and the health impacts are a big part of that,” said Putfark.

According to Balico’s website, the data centers were estimated to bring the county between $50 million and $184 million in annual tax revenue through the mid-2030s. Behind the scenes, however, the developer requested that the county slash its local tax rates, meaning the actual revenue would have been much lower than what Balico projected.

In a July 18, 2024, letter reviewed by the Daily Yonder, Balico asked Pittsylvania County’s Board of Supervisors to reduce property taxes for data centers. Balico did not respond to the Daily Yonder’s request for comment. 

Among residents, Harvard’s health impact report prompted what Wydner called a “paradigm shift” as community members came to terms with how the plant’s eight emissions stacks, each at almost 200 feet tall, would affect their landscape. “Gas plants are not the most gentle neighbors — you really don’t want to be near gas plants over the long haul,” Wydner said.

Cutting corners

As the race to meet surging U.S. power demand accelerates, states like Virginia have taken to luring urban-based developers to rural counties by promising them tax breaks. Typically, the expensive, ultra-powerful computers that fill a data center’s warehouse-sized buildings are taxed as personal property, which can generate significant revenue for the states and communities that host them. 

Yet across the Southeast, state-level incentives for developers reduce the tax revenue that data centers generate. Virginia offers tax exemptions for the purchase and use of computer equipment, so long as data centers meet certain requirements for job creation and investment. West Virginia has a similar policy in place, offering low property tax rates that exempt data centers from paying sales tax on much of their computer equipment. In Kentucky, qualified data centers can also avoid paying sales and use tax, which typically applies to personal property that hasn’t faced a sales tax. 

Locally, counties can still impose property taxes on data centers, like the Balico development in Pittsylvania County. That’s why Balico’s initial proposal included estimates upward of $100 million in annual tax revenue for the county. But residents said that without significant accompanying job creation — Balico’s proposal included a few hundred permanent positions after construction — the destruction to the land and environment didn’t outweigh the proposed economic benefit.

“Nobody can argue the fact that data centers pay revenue to governance, but they don’t have the job creation attached,” Wydner said.

Another area of regulation where data centers find convenient policies is in air pollution permitting, according to Powell. Under current regulations, there’s a loophole with how data centers report emissions to comply with the EPA’s air quality standards.

While Balico came under scrutiny for its primary source of gas-fired power generation, other data centers — even those powered by renewables — rely on gas or diesel power as a backup. Many data centers have emergency diesel generators to keep computers humming during storm-caused outages or other problems with the grid. 

Regardless of how much these diesel-fueled generators turn on, their actual usage rarely has to be included in permitting applications, Powell said. Instead, data centers only need to calculate the emissions associated with running the backup generators for a set number of hours, which often avoids triggering the most severe permitting requirements. As soon as an outage occurs, Powell said, data centers rely on power from all of their backup generators running at once.

“You can easily see how cranking up hundreds of diesel generators could cause violations of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards,” she said. 

An underestimated resistance

In Pittsylvania County, residents ultimately rallied around the opposition to Balico. Between January and April 2025, the developer repeatedly failed to answer community concerns about its revised proposal, which kept the 3,500-megawatt power plant but scaled down the number of data centers.

On April 15, Pittsylvania’s local government voted to deny Balico’s rezoning application. It barred the developer from submitting a “substantially similar” proposal until April 2026, effectively rejecting the data center proposal for at least a year. Balico maintains that an eventual data center campus is not completely off the table, even as it pursues other potential projects for the land, which is still zoned for agricultural and rural residential use. 

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Elizabeth Putfark and fellow SELC attorney Christina Libre attributed their clients’ win to getting in the fight early and at the local level of government. The attorneys also said they think Balico underestimated the resistance they’d face in rural Pittsylvania County. There, opposition to projects like the one Balico proposed does not track neatly along red or blue party lines. 

“The inevitable impact of these big power generation facilities, these fossil fuel plants, is that the local air quality will suffer and people’s health will be impacted, and that’s not something any community wants, no matter how they voted,” Putfark said. 

For lifelong residents like Kathy Stump, the decision came as a relief. 

“Things don’t always have to happen just because they’re proposed,” Stump said. “I mean, everybody has a voice, and we found out that our voices did count this time.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This rural community fought one of the country’s biggest gas-powered data centers — and won on Jun 22, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Julia Tilton, The Daily Yonder.

In the morning, unidentified gunmen broke into Baloch’s home in the Mashkay Tehsil subdivision of Awaran district and shot him dead, according to the local nonprofit Rural Media Network Pakistan. Baloch was struck by four bullets, according to a BBC report, and the four attackers used AK-47 rifles in the assault.

Local police informed the media that an investigation into the killing was underway. The motive remains unclear.

“Pakistani authorities must immediately investigate the reasons behind Latif Baloch’s killing and determine whether it was linked to his work as a journalist,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia regional director. “Journalists in Pakistan face growing violence and intimidation from both state and non-state actors. The government must ensure the safety and freedom of journalists in Balochistan and across the country.”

Baloch was affiliated with major media outlets, including Daily Intekhab, AAJ News, and ARY News, covering the volatile province.

The Balochistan police Inspector General, Moazzam Jah Ansari, did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment via messaging app.

Pakistan remains a dangerous environment for journalists, with heightened risks for those reporting critically on militancy, powerful entities, the military establishment, public corruption, and crime.

CPJ has documented 75 journalists and media workers who have been killed in Pakistan in connection with their work since 1992. Pakistan ranked 12th on CPJ’s 2024 Global Impunity Index, which highlights countries where members of the press are targeted for murder and the perpetrators go unpunished.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

After Eriksen took over the post in 2023, the utility’s members urged him to apply for a flurry of federal funds available through Biden-era legislation. It was a heavy lift for Eriksen’s team to take on 150- to 200-page federal grant applications. They had to do it fast, he said, and they had to be good at it. Even then, they knew, the application might be denied.

It paid off: The electric cooperative was awarded $1.7 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in January 2025 to construct two 1-megawatt solar farms. (The co-op’s peak electric demand is around 70 megawatts, and it already has one 3 MW solar farm.) But just weeks later, President Donald Trump issued an executive order pausing climate and energy spending. As of press time, billions of dollars of funding for rural electric cooperatives, including the San Luis Valley co-op, remains in Washington, D.C.

Ratepayers themselves own rural electric cooperatives and elect the board of directors. Co-ops tend to have older equipment than for-profit utilities. They often use less renewable energy than America’s electric grid as a whole and typically have fewer financial resources to invest in large projects.

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To help fill this gap, the Department of Agriculture launched new programs as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that altogether mark the largest investment in rural electrification since the 1930s. The $9.7 billion Empowering Rural America, known as New ERA for short, and the $1 billion Powering Affordable Clean Energy, or PACE, offered grants and loans to electric cooperatives and other energy companies to build new clean energy facilities and upgrade infrastructure.

“[Electric co-ops] are often at the center of what is going on in a community, and they need to thrive for rural America to grow and prosper,” said Andy Berke, who served as the administrator for the USDA’s Rural Utilities Service, overseeing rural electricity programs, from 2022 until January 2025.

At the end of Biden’s term, the USDA announced awards for 49 rural electric co-ops through New ERA to fund everything from wind, solar, and battery storage to expediting coal plant retirements, upgrading transmission lines, and starting programs to help stabilize the grid during high demand. The PACE program funded 59 organizations, including rural electric co-ops and private energy providers, largely to build solar and battery facilities. The plans co-ops submitted would boost energy supply without big price hikes, Berke said.

High Country News spoke with several former USDA officials and employees or board members at a half-dozen electric cooperatives across Colorado that were set to receive funding from these programs. Some cooperatives met with their representatives and traveled to Washington to urge the new administration to follow through on promised grants.

Then, in late March, the USDA announced that it would release the promised funding. But there was a catch. 

In a press release, the agency asked grant winners to submit revised plans within 30 days “eliminating Biden-era DEIA and climate mandates embedded in previous proposals.” The announcement indicates that these revisions are voluntary, and an online form says grantees that do not wish to alter their projects can notify the agency to initiate transfer of funds. 

The USDA did not respond to questions from High Country News. Although uncertainty remains about project revisions and timelines, electric co-ops are tentatively confident that they will eventually receive the money.

Electric cooperative funding is one part of the IRA that’s apparently getting a green light after initially being frozen. The USDA is also unfreezing $1 billion for agricultural producers and rural small businesses to generate clean energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency released $7 billion in solar funding in February. Still, as of press time, the Trump administration was withholding billions more in IRA funds.

Agriculture is the core of the San Luis Valley’s economy. The 2,800 miles of power lines across sparsely populated terrain cost each San Luis Valley co-op member more to maintain than the grid of any Colorado city or the average rural co-op, Eriksen said. With the sun providing free power, the project slated for funding through New ERA was expected to save the co-op $200,000 per year. “It’s huge,” Eriksen said. “Gosh, these are real dollars that are going to change people’s lives.” 

Electric cooperatives are especially vital in Colorado, where 22 individual co-ops distribute electricity across most of the state. They largely emerged in the 1930s and ’40s to serve rural regions neglected by investor-owned utilities because expanding across vast areas with few customers was unprofitable. Co-ops prioritize safety — storms can down power lines, and improperly monitored and maintained lines can spark wildfires — reliability and affordability.   

But now, the pressure is on for co-ops in Colorado to invest in renewable energy, following passage of state laws starting in 2019 that require utilities to slash their greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2030. Ten rural Colorado co-ops were collectively awarded $800 million in New ERA and PACE funding, the most recipients of any state. 

The federal investment represents a “generational opportunity to make progress in the clean energy transition space,” said Ted Compton, board president of La Plata Electric Association, another Colorado co-op that was awarded $13.4 million through PACE to build solar and battery storage. 

Few co-ops generate all their electricity, relying instead on Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, a large nonprofit active in Colorado, Arizona, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Wyoming, which owns coal-fired power plants and utility-scale solar installations. In an email, Lee Boughey, vice president for strategic communications, said Tri-State is forecasting significant electricity load growth and needs infrastructure upgrades. Reliable, affordable power is the “lifeblood of rural communities, farmers, ranchers,” and other industries, he wrote. Tri-State was also awarded $2.5 billion through New ERA to add more than a gigawatt of renewable energy and help offset the cost of closing down several coal-powered units. Without that money, the consequences — in the form of dirtier energy or a more costly transition to renewables — could ripple across the West.

Experts have questioned the legality of the Trump administration’s attempt to withhold federal dollars. “Only Congress has the power of the purse,” said Jillian Blanchard, a lawyer and the vice president of climate change and environmental justice at Lawyers for Good Government, a nonprofit that supports pro bono attorneys. Many grant winners already have a signed legal agreement with the federal government, and in addition to infringing on Congress’ authority, Blanchard said withholding those funds violates the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.  

In the San Luis Valley, beginning solar construction without the $1.7 million would be slower, cost ratepayers more and, in the meantime, require burning more fossil fuels. Eriksen said he intends to forge ahead; he already has designs, a contractor, and a shovel-ready location, though he can’t take the next step until the funding question is settled. 

“We’re waiting and seeing to get some certainty before we move forward,” Eriksen said.   

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Colorado’s rural electric co-ops are determined to go green on May 10, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Keaton Peters, High Country News.

Before being shuttered in early March, the EPA’s environmental justice arm was aimed at making sure communities were being treated fairly and receiving their due protection under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. Zealan Hoover, former senior advisor to the EPA administrator under the Biden administration, told the Daily Yonder that this work had big implications for rural places since there are pollution concerns in rural areas across the country. 

“EPA was very focused on making sure that not just on the regulatory side, but also on the investment side, we were pushing resources into rural communities,” said Hoover. 

According to Hoover, most of the pollution challenges the U.S. faces are not new. He said that the employees, now on leave, who staffed the EPA’s regional environmental justice offices were deeply knowledgeable on the issues affecting communities in their regions — issues that can go on for decades. Hoover said he worries about recent changes to the agency under the Trump administration, which also include a series of deregulatory actions and a proposed 65 percent budget cut. 

“I trust that the great folks at EPA who remain will still try valiantly to fill those gaps, but the reality is that this administration is pushing to cut EPA’s budget, pushing employees to leave, and that’s going to restrict EPA’s ability to help rural communities tackle their most significant pollution challenges,” Hoover said. 

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One rural community that has faced years of environmental challenges is where Sherri White-Williamson lives in rural Sampson County, North Carolina. In 2021, the county’s landfill ranked second on the list of highest methane emitters in the U.S. The county is also the second-largest producer of hogs nationwide, and in 2022, it accounted for nearly three percent of all U.S. hog sales. 

The hog industry is known for its pollution from open waste storage pits that emit toxic chemicals into nearby neighborhoods. For years, concerns about North Carolina’s hog industry have centered on the disproportionate harm that its pollution does to low-income communities and communities of color since hog farms frequently locate their operations adjacent to such communities in rural counties. 

White-Williamson is also an EPA veteran. She worked on environmental justice initiatives at the agency’s Washington, D.C., office for over a decade before moving back home to southeastern North Carolina. She is now the executive director of the Environmental Justice Community Action Network, or EJCAN, which she founded in Sampson County in 2020 to empower her neighbors amidst environmental challenges like those wrought by the hog farms and the landfill.

In her early work with EJCAN, White-Williamson said she noticed that conversations about environmental justice often centered on urban areas. Since then, White-Williamson said she has focused on educating the public about what environmental justice looks like in rural communities. 

“A lot of our issues have to do with what the cities don’t want or dispose of will end up in our communities,” said White-Williamson. “The pollution, the pesticides, the remnants of the food processing all ends up or stays here while all of the nice, clean, freshly prepared product ends up in a local urban grocery store somewhere.”

Another misconception about environmental justice, according to White-Williamson, is that it exists exclusively to serve communities of color. During her time at the EPA, White-Williamson said she spent time in communities with all kinds of racial demographics while working on environmental justice initiatives.

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“I spent a lot of time in places like West Virginia and Kentucky, and places where the populations aren’t necessarily of color, but they are poor-income or low-income places where folks do not have access to the levers of power,” White-Williamson said. 

When pollution impacts local health in communities without access to such “levers of power,” the EPA’s regional environmental justice offices were a resource — and a form of accountability. Without those offices, it will be more difficult for rural communities to get the services they need to address health concerns, said Dr. Margot Brown, senior vice president of justice and equity at the Environmental Defense Fund. 

“They’re dismantling the ecosystem of health protections for rural Americans, and by dismantling them, they’ll make them more susceptible to future hazards,” Brown said of the Trump administration’s decisions at the EPA. “It will impair health and well-being for generations to come.”

Brown worked at the EPA for nearly 10 years under President Obama and then under President Trump during his first administration. Her time there included a stint as deputy director of the Office of Children’s Health Protection. She, along with Hoover and White-Williamson, said that community members will likely need to turn to their state governments or departments of environmental quality in the absence of the regional environmental justice offices.

But White-Williamson noted that state governments, too, receive federal funding. Frozen funds across federal agencies and cuts to healthcare programs, including Medicaid, could wind up compounding challenges for rural communities trying to mitigate environmental health impacts. 

“The communities that most need the assistance and guidance will again find themselves on the short end of the stick and end up being the ones that are suffering more than anybody else,” White-Williamson said. 

Hoover described it as a “one-two punch” for rural communities. On the one hand, he said, rural places are losing access to healthcare facilities because of budget cuts.

“And on the other hand, they are also sicker because the government is no longer stopping polluters from polluting their air and their water.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Closures of EPA’s regional environmental justice offices will hurt rural America on Apr 5, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Julia Tilton, The Daily Yonder.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capitol News Illinois. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

CARBONDALE, Ill. — I grew up off a gravel road near a town of 60 people, a place where cows outnumber people.

Southern Illinois University, just 40 miles north, opened up my world. I saw my first concerts here, debated big ideas in giant lecture halls and shared dorms with people who looked like no one I’d ever met. Two of my most influential professors came from opposite ends of the political spectrum.

SIU was the only four-year college within reach when I enrolled here in the fall of 2000 — both in miles and cost. And it set me on the path to who I would become. That’s why I accepted a job here teaching journalism two years ago. It is still a place of opportunity, but I was struck by how fragile it had become — a fraction of its former size, grappling with relentless enrollment and budget concerns.

Now, it faces new threats. The Trump administration has proposed cuts to research and labs across the country; targeted certain schools with diversity, equity and inclusion programs; and signed an executive order to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, which manages student loans. State officials estimate that proposed funding reductions from the National Institutes of Health alone would cost SIU about $4.5 million.

In addition, conservative activists are on the lookout for what they deem “woke” depravity at universities. This is true at SIU as well, where students received emails from at least one conservative group offering to pay them to act as informants or write articles to help “expose the liberal bias that occurs on college campuses across the nation.”

Schools like SIU, located in a region that overwhelmingly voted for President Donald Trump, may not be the primary targets of his threatened funding cuts, but they — along with the communities they serve — stand to lose the most.

There are nearly 500 regional public universities across the U.S., serving around 5 million students — about half of all undergraduates enrolled in public universities, according to the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges at Appalachian State University. These institutions of higher learning span nearly every state, with many rooted in rural areas and communities facing high unemployment, childhood poverty and limited access to medical care. They play a vital role in lifting up struggling individuals — and in some cases, entire communities that could very easily die out without them.

While Trump’s actions have primarily targeted high-profile institutions like Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, some regional schools are also under investigation for alleged racial discrimination tied to DEI programs. (So far, SIU hasn’t been named in any federal probes.)

“This is definitely one of those baby-in-the-bathwater moments,” said Cecilia Orphan, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Denver, who is a lead researcher with the regional colleges alliance. While the administration has “a bone to pick with a particular type of institution,” she said, “there are all these other institutions that serve your community, your constituents.”

Regional schools like SIU tend to operate with fewer resources than their counterparts, relying on federal and state money to support both the students and the school. Greater shares of students rely on need-based federal financial aid like Pell Grants, low-cost student loans and subsidized student work programs.

And in terms of research, while attention goes to large, elite schools, hundreds of the schools spending at least $2.5 million on scientific studies — the threshold for qualifying as a research school — are regional public universities. SIU pumps $60 million annually into research. About a quarter of that money comes from the federal government.

At SIU, as at other regional universities, many research projects focus on overlooked issues in their own backyards. Here that means studying ways to help farmers yield stronger crops, to deal with invasive species in the waterways, and to deliver mental health care to remote schools.

“We are at a crossroads and facing a national crisis. It is going to have far-reaching consequences for higher education,” said Mary Louise Cashel, a clinical psychology professor at SIU whose research, which focuses on youth violence prevention among diverse populations, relies on federal funding.

Supporters of Trump’s proposed research funding cuts say schools should dip into their endowment funds to offset the recent cuts. But SIU’s $210 million endowment, almost all of it earmarked for specific purposes, is pocket change compared with Ivy League schools like Yale, which has a similar student population size but a roughly $41 billion endowment. At present, SIU faces a $9.4 million deficit, the result of declining enrollments and years of state budget cuts; there is no cushion for it to fall back on.

Intertwined with SIU’s fate is that of Carbondale, a town of 21,500 about 50 miles from the borders of Kentucky and Missouri. Since its founding in 1869, the university has turned Carbondale into a tiny cultural mecca and a powerful economic engine in an otherwise vast, rural region that has been battered by the decline of manufacturing and coal mining. Three decades ago, SIU and Carbondale felt electric: Lecture halls overflowed; local businesses thrived on the fall surge of students; The Strip, a longstanding student hangout, spilled over every weekend, music rattling windows into the early morning hours.

The “Dirty Dale,” as the town is affectionately known, still carries traces of its college-town energy, and SIU remains the largest employer in the region. But there’s an undeniable fade as the student population is now half the size it was in the 1990s. Some of the local anchor establishments along The Strip have vanished. Now, more cuts threaten to push the university, and the town that depends on it, to a breaking point.

Jeff Vaughn, a retired police officer who has owned Tres Hombres restaurant and bar in the heart of town for the past 10 years, says the school, though smaller, still has a huge impact on businesses’ bottom lines.

“It’s dollar bills coming into the city” that wouldn’t be here otherwise, he said. “It’s the people who work there, the people going to school there — every part of it brings money into the city. A basketball game happens, people come into town and they usually go out to eat before the game.”

Even before the Trump administration began its cuts in academia, it was clear to regional leaders that the school and the community needed to do more. A 2020 report by a regional economic development agency issued a warning: “The region can no longer sit idle and let SIU tackle these issues on their own.”

The Rev. Joseph A. Brown, a professor of Africana studies at Southern Illinois University, calls federal orders on higher education “epistolary drones.”

“Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb,” Brown said, “and everybody’s running and ducking.”

Brown spoke by phone in late February, his oxygen tank humming in the background after a bout of pneumonia. While he was in the hospital, his inbox and phone were blowing up with panicked messages about the federal directive that schools eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

That’s because diversity also means something more in regional public universities: Many students at SIU come from families that are poor, or barely middle class, and depend on scholarships and mentorship to succeed. Paul Frazier, SIU’s vice chancellor for anti-racism, diversity, equity and inclusion, said the way DEI has been politicized ignores what it actually does: “Poor doesn’t have a color.”

But beyond helping students, DEI is also about the school’s survival.

In 2021, SIU Chancellor Austin Lane rolled out Imagine 2030 — an ambitious blueprint for rebuilding SIU Carbondale. It called for doubling down on research, expanding student success programs and, at its core, embedding diversity into how the university operates, including in the recruitment of students, hiring and training of faculty and staff, and creation of programs that offer extra help to students struggling to keep up in their classes. It also called for growing SIU’s enrollment to 15,000.

SIU won’t reach that goal without targeted recruitment. “You can’t do that without bringing more of the largest-growing population, which is Latinx and Hispanic students,” Frazier said. “It’ll be like an old Western,” Frazier said of the risks of further eroding SIU. “It’ll be a ghost town.

SIU is offering marketing materials in Spanish for the first time in years. Similar efforts are going into reigniting passion for SIU throughout Cook County, home to Chicago; near St. Louis, and in high schools close by.

While the plan was new, the desire to bring in students from a wide range of backgrounds was not. From the start, SIU grew against the grain by embracing diversity in a region that often didn’t.

In 1874, two Black women enrolled in the school’s first class. A few years later, Alexander Lane became SIU’s first Black male student and then its first Black graduate, according to research by an SIU history professor. Born to an enslaved mother in Mississippi, Lane graduated and became a teacher, then a doctor, then a lawmaker in the state Capitol. Today, a scholarship in his name helps students gain internships in state government.

During World War II, SIU expanded to accommodate returning soldiers on the GI Bill. It designed parts of campus with accessibility in mind for wounded veterans in hopes of drawing students and boosting enrollment.

By 1991, the student body peaked at nearly 25,000. And even amid significant changes that hurt enrollment, by 2010 it still had 20,000.

In the decade that followed, SIU lost nearly 9,000 students—a nearly 45% drop. A lot happened, but one decision proved fateful: Concerns had surfaced that SIU was enrolling underprepared Black students from inner-city Chicago and failing to support them. At the same time, the university wanted to reshape its image, positioning itself as a world-class research institution. Officials targeted a different type of student and stopped recruiting as heavily in Cook County.

This era also saw a state budget crisis, and high-level leadership churned amid constant drama. (The university had seven chancellors between 2010 and 2020.) Eventually, it wasn’t about pulling away from Cook County — it was about having no direction at all. And by the end of the decade, SIU had fewer than 12,000 students. By the time the chancellor unfurled Imagine 2030, it was clear that diversity — in all its forms — was the only path forward.

It’s easy to destabilize a school. But restoring it? That’s a much harder challenge.

Still, recently, it has felt like SIU has been clawing its way back. There have been two straight years of enrollment gains, driven in part by an influx of students coming from Southern Illinois and again from Cook County, as well as by growing online programs. And in late February, the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, which ranks universities by research spending, elevated SIU to its “very high” Research 1 status. In academic circles, it’s a big deal — putting SIU on the academic research map and bestowing it a status symbol that helps recruit top faculty and students.

“It’s a great day to be a Saluki,” SIU President Dan Mahony said, referencing SIU’s canine mascot, at a February celebration of that promotion. Then there was a pop, and confetti rained down.

But the federal financial directives and cultural wars roiling higher education are, once again, unsettling the campus and wider community. Things escalated earlier this month when SIU became a new target for the right: A social media account known for targeting LGBTQ+ people and DEI initiatives, Libs of TikTok, posted about an SIU professor who had uploaded explicit photos of himself online. The post, about an openly gay School of Medicine professor who has been publicly critical of Trump, took off, racking up more than 3 million views and hundreds of shares and comments.

“LoTT INVESTIGATION: LGBTQ professor at a Public University posts extreme p*rnographic videos of himself m*sturbating ON CAMPUS,” it read.

His employee profile quickly disappeared from the school’s website, and within days, SIU officials announced he was no longer employed by the university; he was subsequently charged with two misdemeanor counts of public indecency, and an arraignment hearing is scheduled for late April. But the controversy made SIU, not just the professor, a target. The post also took SIU to task for promoting itself on a hiring website as an “anti-racist” community. “SIU receives tens of millions of dollars from the federal government. SIU is violating Trump’s EO and should be stripped of their federal funding,” it read, tagging Elon Musk’s cost-cutting federal Department of Government Efficiency.

The irony is high: While Carbondale, where the school is located, is a solidly blue island, it is surrounded by a conservative rural region hanging in the balance.

Across the nation, universities are eliminating or rebranding DEI offices to avoid federal scrutiny. SIU isn’t backing down.

“As a university, we need to stay the course,” Phil Gilbert, chair of SIU’s Board of Trustees and a longtime federal judge appointed by George H.W. Bush, said at a recent board meeting.“I can’t think of an institution more important to diversity, equity and inclusion than an educational institution, because education is the bridge to tomorrow for everyone.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Molly Parker, Capitol News Illinois.

Photograph Source: Duane Lempke – Duane Lempke Photography – CC0

The National Institutes of Health is the largest federal funder of medical research in the U.S. NIH funds drive research and innovation, leading to better understanding and treatment of diseases and improved health outcomes.

The NIH provided more than US$35 billion in grants to over 2,500 universities and other institutions in 2023 to support biomedical research. Thus, it came as a shock to these institutions when the NIH, based on a new Trump administration policy, announced on Feb. 7, 2025, that it intends to cut the funding used to support the grantee institutions by $5.5 billion annually.

On March 5, a U.S. district judge in Boston issued a nationwide injunction blocking the administration from implementing the proposed cuts to NIH funding, arguing that the planned cuts were unlawful. However, the White House will almost certainly appeal.

We are a husband-and-wife team of immunologists who have been funded by the NIH for several decades. We believe our research has led to a better understanding of inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. In addition, one of us (Prakash Nagarkatti) served as vice president for research at the University of South Carolina for over a decade, managing all NIH grants awarded to the university.

While we believe such cuts will be detrimental to the entire country, they will disproportionately hurt states that traditionally have received very low levels of NIH funding, the majority of which are red states that supported Trump’s election to a second term. This is because such states lack resources to develop advanced research infrastructure necessary to compete nationally for NIH funding.

Several Republican senators have vocally opposed the funding cuts, including Susan Collins of Maine, who said they “would be devastating, stopping vital biomedical research and leading to the loss of jobs.”

Support for cancer, Alzheimer’s research

NIH funding is crucial for advancing biomedical research, improving public health and fostering innovation. It has a broad impact on different facets of society.

The agency funds biomedical research leading to the development of vaccines or new drugs to prevent and treat infectious diseases and clinical disorders. The NIH played a crucial role in funding research on pandemics and global health crises caused by HIV/AIDS and COVID-19.

In addition, the NIH supports advanced research in focused areas such as cancer, through the establishment of designated centers that offer cancer prevention, diagnosis, clinical trials and advanced treatment. Each year, approximately 400,000 patients receive cancer diagnoses and treatment at such centers.

Similarly, the NIH supports research in other focused areas, such as Alzheimer’s disease, through the establishment of specialized research centers.

The NIH also supports Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer opportunities. These programs stimulate technological innovation by funding small businesses to commercialize new research ideas.

Moreover, the agency provides funding to train the next generation of biomedical scientists, clinicians and public health professionals. Thus, the NIH awards create jobs at universities, biotechnology companies and related industries. Together, such NIH programs promote local and national economies.

In 2024, NIH funding generated an estimated US$92 billion in economic activity. Every $100 million in NIH funding generates 76 patents, which creates $598 million in further research and development, as reported by NIH.

Therefore, any cuts to the agency’s budget will have far-reaching and significant consequences on health outcomes and the economy.

Caps on indirect costs

When the NIH awards grants, it is divided into two separate categories: the direct costs, which include expenses that are necessary to pursue the proposed work and that are provided to the scientists, and the indirect costs. These cover expenses such as maintenance of lab space, utilities, grant management, federal regulatory compliance, security and other miscellaneous needs. These funds are provided directly to the institution.

Indirect costs are negotiated between the institution and the federal agency and expressed as a percentage of the direct costs. Because each institution has unique operational expenses, the indirect cost rates vary from 30% to 70%.

The new policy rolled out by the NIH capped the indirect costs for all institutions at a fixed rate of 15%. In 2023, NIH spent $35 billion to support research at various institutions, of which $9 billion was used to cover indirect costs. Thus, NIH estimates it could save $4 billion by capping indirect costs at 15%.

How red states get hurt the most

There is a significant geographic disparity in NIH funding that most people are unaware of. There are 27 states in the U.S. that receive 94% of NIH funding, while the other 23 states receive only 6%. Moreover, the NIH funding received by the 23 states has remained relatively unchanged for the past 20  years.

There are many reasons why the latter states are less competitive. These include: lack of large medical centers, hospitals and research-intensive universities; thin and more rural populations; less robust economies; and lack of cutting-edge research infrastructure driven by less investment by the states in research and development.

It is for these reasons that Congress in 1993 authorized the NIH to start a new program called the Institutional Development Award, or IDeA, to support the 23 states plus Puerto Rico that have traditionally received low levels of NIH funding. Such states are commonly called IDeA states and contain predominantly rural and medically underserved communities.

These awards, which constitute less than 1% of the total NIH budget, are expected to help these states grow their research infrastructure and make them more competitive nationally.

The IDeA states are: Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming, plus Puerto Rico. All the states but Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Rhode Island and Vermont voted for Trump in the 2024 election.

Indirect costs pay for cutting-edge technologies

Indirect costs, in addition to supporting the management of specific grants, are also helpful in promoting the institutions’ research infrastructure.

The indirect costs help purchase and upgrade state-of-the-art research equipment and technologies. They help institutions develop high-performance computing facilities that are critical for research missions and provide access to journals and books through the library facilities. These costs also renovate old labs and help create new cutting-edge facilities such as germ-free facilities for microbiome research.

Thus, the indirect costs are critical for IDeA states that have limited resources such as state support for pursuing research.

According to the Higher Education Research and Development Survey, in 2023, non-IDeA states like California invested $548 million and New York over $303 million in R&D. In contrast, IDeA states Kentucky and West Virginia invested $49 million and $15 million, respectively, in R&D.

Such data clearly demonstrates how challenging it would be for IDeA states to face cuts in NIH funding and advance research infrastructure.

In our view, it is critical that all states have access to NIH research funding to enable the states to solve the unique challenges they face, such as environmental issues and population health disparities.

For example, biomedical scientists and clinicians trained by NIH grants are addressing locally relevant issues such as coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, commonly known as black lung disease, which occurs when coal dust is inhaled. This is an occupational hazard linked to the coal industry in West Virginia and Kentucky.

Similarly, Hawaii, with its tropical climate, has mosquitoes that can carry dengue virus, so dengue infection can pose a unique health and economic problem for this state when compared with the others in the U.S.

Training the biomedical workforce and physicians in IDeA states also helps with retaining health providers in the state to further address these local challenges and prevents brain-drain to other non-IDeA states.

IDeA states heavily rely on NIH funds to pursue and advance their research capabilities and address local and general health challenges. For such states, already struggling to receive NIH funding, reducing indirect costs would further exacerbate their disadvantages, increasing the risk of falling behind in medical research, patient care and regional economic growth.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post NIH Funding Cuts Will Hit Red States, Rural Areas and Underserved Communities the Hardest appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Prakash Nagarkatti – Mitzi Nagarkatti.

This article was produced for ProPublica's Local Reporting Network in partnership with KYUK and NPR's Station Investigations Team, which supports local investigative journalism. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Nearly two dozen children in the tiny village of Sleetmute, Alaska, arrive for school each morning to a small brown building that is on the verge of collapse.

Every year for the past 19 years, the local school district has asked the state for money to help repair a leaky roof. But again and again, the state said no. Over time, water ran down into the building, causing the supporting beams to rot. A windowpane cracked under pressure as heavy snow and ice built up on the roof each winter. Eventually, an entire wall started to buckle, leaving a gaping hole in the exterior siding.

In 2021, an architect concluded that the school, which primarily serves Alaska Native students, “should be condemned as it is unsafe for occupancy.”

The following year, Taylor Hayden, a resident who helps with school maintenance, opened a hatch in the floor to fix a heating problem and discovered a pool of water under the building, where years of rain and snowmelt had reduced several concrete footings to rubble.

“Just like someone took a jackhammer to it,” Hayden said.

The Sleetmute school, nestled on the upper reaches of the Kuskokwim River, amid the spruce and birch forest of Alaska’s Interior, has few options. Like many schools in Alaska, it’s owned by the state, which is required by law to pay for construction and maintenance projects.

Yet over the past 25 years, state officials have largely ignored hundreds of requests by rural school districts to fix the problems that have left public schools across Alaska crumbling, according to an investigation by KYUK and ProPublica.

Local school districts are generally responsible for building and maintaining public schools in the United States and largely pay for those projects with property taxes. But in Alaska, the state owns just under half of the 128 schools in its rural districts, a KYUK and ProPublica review of deeds and other documents found. These sparsely populated areas rely almost entirely on the state to finance school facilities because they serve unincorporated communities that have no tax base.

To get help for repairs, school districts are required to apply for funding each year, and then the state compiles a priority list. Since 1998, at least 135 rural school projects have waited for state funding for five years or more, an analysis of data from Alaska’s Department of Education and Early Development shows. Thirty-three of those projects have languished on the state’s funding list for more than a decade.

The state’s Indigenous children suffer the greatest consequences because most rural school districts are predominantly Alaska Native — a population that was long forced to attend separate and unequal schools.

State education Commissioner Deena Bishop acknowledged that the state’s capital improvement program isn’t working. But she said her department is limited by state lawmakers’ funding decisions.

Rep. Bryce Edgmon, an Alaska Native and speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives, also said the program isn’t working.

“I think the evidence speaks for itself,” he said after touring the Sleetmute school in October. “These bright young children show up every morning to go to school in a building that’s not fit for even anything but being ready to be demolished.”

Edgmon, who co-chaired the House Finance Committee for the past two years, conceded he and other lawmakers could have done more and promised to “raise some Cain” in the state Capitol. This year’s legislative session has seen a lot of debate about education funding. Alaska has no statewide income or sales tax and instead relies on oil revenue, which has declined in recent years.

As rural school districts wait for funding, the buildings continue to deteriorate, posing public health and safety risks to students, teachers and staff. Over the past year, KYUK and ProPublica crawled under buildings and climbed into attics in schools across the state and found black mold, bat guano and a pool of raw sewage — health hazards that can cause respiratory problems, headaches and fatigue. The conditions exacerbate the risks for Alaska Natives, who already face some of the highest rates of chronic illness in the nation.

In Venetie, a village 30 miles north of the Arctic Circle, exposed electrical wiring hangs close to flammable insulation. Thorne Bay, on an island in Southeast Alaska, has requested money to replace the fire sprinklers 17 times, without success. And in the Bering Sea coastal village of Newtok, the school’s pipes froze and broke, so for most of the last school year, kids rode a four-wheeler, known as the “bathroom bus,” twice a day to relieve themselves at home.

After Hayden’s discovery in Sleetmute, the portion of the building that posed the most serious safety risk, which includes the wood shop, the boys’ bathroom and the gym, was closed. Now, kids ranging in age from 4 to 17 are confined to three classrooms and an atrium lined with portraits of the community’s Yup’ik and Athabascan elders.

“There’s not much we can do anymore,” said Neal Sanford, 17, who misses playing basketball and learning carpentry and woodworking. He left the village of fewer than 100 people after his sophomore year last spring to attend a state-run boarding school more than 800 miles away.

In October, it was quiet outside the Jack Egnaty Sr. School in Sleetmute, save for a dog that barked now and then and the distant revving of a four-wheeler. The air smelled of wood smoke and two-stroke engine exhaust. Without a gym to play in, the kids bundled up for recess as temperatures dipped below freezing.

“Cold hands,” said fourth grader Loretta Sakar, as she shook out her fingers after crossing the monkey bars. Her squeals and giggles echoed across the playground while other kids played soccer or spun on a tire swing.

Watch video ➜

Andrea John, a single mom whose three kids, including Loretta, go to the Sleetmute school, said the state wouldn’t treat Alaska’s urban kids this way.

“They should have helped us when we needed help in the beginning, not wait 20 years,” she said. “They are choosing to look the other way and say the hell with us.”

When Alaska became a state in 1959, its constitution promised a public school system “open to all children of the State.” But for decades, it was far from that. Many Indigenous children attended schools owned and operated by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Alaska’s plan was to eventually take over those schools, but the state repeatedly argued it didn’t have enough money to pay for them. The development of Alaska’s oil industry, starting in the 1960s, brought in revenue for education, but state officials noted that BIA schools were in bad shape and insisted the federal government fix them before the state assumed responsibility.

Many Alaska children “go to school in buildings that should be condemned as fire traps or unsafe dwellings,” then-U.S. Sen. Mike Gravel said during a 1971 congressional hearing. It wasn’t until well into the 1980s that all BIA schools were transferred to the state.

Yet even as the state began to take over, education remained inequitable for Alaska Natives. Many small villages didn’t have high schools, so students had to attend boarding schools or receive and submit assignments by mail. A group of those students sued the state in the 1970s to change that. Known as the Molly Hootch case, the suit resulted in a consent decree that forced the state to build 126 new schools in rural communities.

In the early 1990s, the Alaska Legislature started a program to fund school construction and major maintenance projects. Schools districts would apply for grants, and the state education department would rank projects based on need. But the Legislature provided little money for the need-based program. Instead, a small group of powerful lawmakers allocated funding to projects in their own districts, favoring urban areas.

In 1997, a group of Alaska Native parents sued the state, arguing that the funding system violated Alaska’s constitution and the federal Civil Rights Act. State Superior Court Judge John Reese agreed.

“Because of the funding system, rural schools are not getting the money they need to maintain their schools,” he wrote in a 1999 order. “Deficiencies include roofs falling in, no drinkable water, sewage backing up, and enrollment up to 187% of capacity. Some rural schools have been at the top of the priority list for a number of years, yet have received no funding.”

In another order, he called the state’s system “arbitrary, inadequate and racially discriminatory,” and said the state had a responsibility to provide education to Alaska Native children “even if it costs more in the rural areas.”

A 2011 consent decree and settlement required the state to build five new rural schools, and the Legislature passed a bill that was supposed to more equitably allocate funds to rural districts.

Yet more than a decade later, the problems pointed out by Reese persist. Every year, rural school districts make more than 100 requests, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. But the Legislature funds only a tiny fraction of those projects. In five of the last 11 years, it has approved fewer than five requests.

An analysis by KYUK and ProPublica shows that Alaska’s education department has received 1,789 funding proposals from rural school districts since 1998. But only 14% of them have received funding. This year, requests from rural school districts to the state’s construction and maintenance program stand at $478 million.

Edgmon acknowledged that the Legislature’s funding decisions don’t come close to meeting the needs of Alaska’s rural public schools. “We have not upheld our constitutional duty to provide that quality of education that the courts have said time and again we’re bound to be providing,” he said.

When pressed on why funding is so hard to secure, state education commissioner Bishop told KYUK last year that rural schools were good for the community. “But, at the same token, it’s unsustainable to have $50 million go to 10 students,” she said. “I mean, think about the unsustainability of that in the long run.”

Allowing projects to sit on a waitlist for years also means they can become more expensive over time. The Kuspuk School District’s first request to repair Sleetmute’s school was for just over $411,000 in 2007. By 2024, the request had climbed to $1.6 million — more than twice the original cost, even after adjusting for inflation.

“To me that’s neglectful,” Kuspuk Superintendent Madeline Aguillard said. “Our cries for help haven’t been heard.”

Roughly 200 miles southwest, the coastal village of Quinhagak waited 15 years for a renovation and addition to its Kuinerrarmiut Elitnaurviat School that would allow it to meet the state’s space requirements. The school serves 200 students, more than twice the number it was designed for.

In addition to its fire sprinklers, Thorne Bay in the Southeast Island School District has asked the state 18 times to replace a pair of aging underground heating-fuel tanks that the district worries could start to leak. Superintendent Rod Morrison, whose district spans an area of Alaska’s southern archipelago that’s roughly the size of Connecticut, said his district’s list of maintenance needs is seemingly endless.

“Education is supposed to be the big equalizer,” said Morrison. “It is not equal in the state of Alaska.”

Rural school district officials say, given their scarce resources, the state’s construction and maintenance program creates burdens. The application for funding comes with a 37-page guidance document, loaded with references to state statute and administrative code. It also requires districts to include a six-year capital improvement plan. Meeting these requirements can be challenging in rural school districts, where administrative turnover is high and staffing is limited.

To increase the likelihood that a project gets funded, some rural superintendents say they feel pressure to provide engineering inspections or site condition surveys with their applications.

“There’s only a few needles that you can move,” said David Landis of the Southeast Regional Resource Center, a nonprofit that, among other things, helps school districts compile their applications for a fee.

Landis said inspections and surveys are likely to increase the ranking for a project proposal, but “those documents are really foundational and expensive. They might very well be over $100,000.”

The Kuspuk School District has spent more than $200,000 since 2021 to beef up its applications for the Sleetmute school, Aguillard said. It’s also paid tens of thousands of dollars to a lobbyist to persuade legislators to increase maintenance funding for schools the state itself owns.

Some school districts said they simply can’t afford such costs. “We don’t have that ability,” said Morrison of the Southeast Island School District. “We’d have to cut a teacher or two to make that happen.”

Last summer, Sleetmute got some good news. After ignoring 19 requests, the state had finally approved its roof repair after Alaska legislators passed a bill that boosted school maintenance and construction funding to its highest level in more than a decade.

But it’s “too little, too late,” Aguillard said. The building’s condition has deteriorated so much that Sleetmute now needs a new school.

As a result, the district has asked if it could use the roof repair money to shore up the school to prevent a collapse, to bring in modular classrooms or to have school in another community building. But, Aguillard said, Alaska’s education department has been reluctant to approve any of those options. Instead, she said, the department made a baffling request: It asked for proof that the state had never paid to repair Sleetmute’s leaking roof — something clearly outlined in state records — and that the neglect had caused the additional damage.

In an email, the education department wrote, “This step was taken to ensure proper use of funds and to understand the full scope of work required.”

Watch video ➜

A KYUK and ProPublica analysis found that in at least 20 cases, funding requests waited for so long that cheaper repairs morphed into proposals to tear down and replace schools. Those schools that were rebuilt cost the state tens of millions of dollars more than the initial estimates.

The Auntie Mary Nicoli Elementary School project in Aniak, about 100 miles downriver from Sleetmute, started as a $9.5 million renovation in 2007. But after waiting 11 years, the state spent $18.6 million to replace it in 2018.

A few districts are still waiting for schools they say need to be replaced. The first request for the Johnnie John Sr. School project in Crooked Creek, 40 miles downriver from Sleetmute, in 1998 was for a $4.8 million addition. But by 2009, the district was asking for a $19 million replacement. The Legislature failed to fund the project even after the district pared down its request. Unable to secure funding for a new school, the district is now trying to stretch $1.9 million it received from the state last year to make the most necessary repairs: upgrades to heating and electrical systems and the removal of hazardous materials.

In most of Alaska’s rural communities, life often requires making do with what’s available: People keep piles of old machinery in their yards to mine for parts. In villages that aren’t on the road system, almost everything is either shipped in by barge or delivered by air. In Sleetmute, a 24-pack of soda costs $54 — about four times the price in the Lower 48.

Watch video ➜

This is also why construction projects are extremely expensive: Skilled workers have to be flown in, housed and fed. Heavy equipment has to zigzag up the Kuskokwim River, which is frozen for half the year. The school district was hoping to reduce costs by sharing machinery with a project to upgrade the community’s runway. But when that project wrapped up this fall, the state transportation department shipped its equipment out of Sleetmute.

So the school is left to make do. Everyone has to share one bathroom. A manila folder hangs from a pink thread on the door. It reads “Boys” on one side and “Girls” on the other to indicate whose turn it is.

Sleetmute’s school is also full of black mold that covers the buckling wall in the wood shop, a gear closet in the gym and a huge section of drywall in the ceiling just above the door to the kitchen.

This fall the community discovered another problem. Sheree Smith, who has taught in Sleetmute for 12 years, found herself swinging a tennis racket at a bat that swooped through her classroom as her middle and high school students sat reading quietly. The bats live above the gym bleachers in a small utility closet, where the floor is covered in guano.

Without a gym, students miss out on events that connect the school to both the community and the outside world. Every year, the Sleetmute school would host basketball tournaments and movie nights to raise money for field trips to places like Anchorage and Washington, D.C. — a luxury for many families in Sleetmute and other rural communities in Alaska. The students “feel the pain of that, like just not having the extra opportunities,” said Angela Hayden, Sleetmute’s lead teacher.

Over the holiday break, the school district reinforced the back end of the building with floor-to-ceiling supports to keep the woodshop from collapsing.

But it’s only a temporary fix. The roof has been leaking since Hayden started teaching there 17 years ago.

“When I come in the building, especially after a lot of rain or a lot of snow,” she said, “I just think, ‘OK, what am I going to have to deal with before I can deal with my classroom?’”

If you have information about school conditions in Alaska, contact Emily Schwing at emilyschwing@gmail.com.

Emily Schwing reported this story while participating in the University of Southern California, Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship. She also received support from the Center’s Fund for Reporting on Child Well-being and its Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Emily Schwing, KYUK.

Wives and children in Battambang’s Kdol Daun Teav commune earn extra money by slicing up bananas, laying them out to dry on bamboo skewers and then selling them as snacks to people who travel to the area to visit Wat Ek Phnom, an Angkor-era temple.

Making the banana chips requires patience, according to Nuon Chamnan. It takes a long time to peel bananas, and some days she has to peel and slice bananas until midnight to meet orders.

“Sometimes there are so many foreign visitors and then there are no leftovers for other customers,” she said.

A journey to Wat Ek Phnom is a popular day trip for people staying in Battambang town, which is about 9 km (5 miles) away from Kdol Daun Teav, where residents grow rice and gather fish from the Sankae River.

Over the last few years, word has gotten around that tourists can see the traditional livelihood of Cambodian villagers while also buying a unique snack.

Nuon Chamnan said she slices about 50 bananas a day, and can make about 50,000 riels (US$12.50) in sales. The business doesn’t require much of an upfront investment – just a lot of work, she said.

“It’s not like we do it with machines,” said another banana seller, Khun Srey Lek.

“We use our hands to do it normally, so it’s not tiring,” she said. “We just do it from morning to night, so we do it lightly, like a house chore.”

Translated by Yun Samean. Edited by Matt Reed.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Khmer.

For those like Reardon, a resident of the Lincoln Woodstock community in northern New Hampshire, this kind of routine is not uncommon. Public charging stations for electric vehicles, or EVs, are scarce in rural parts of the state. Compared to the rest of New England, which includes Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont, the Granite State has lagged in its rollout of public EV infrastructure. 

“They’re kind of sprinkled along parts around the White Mountains,” said Reardon. “You don’t often see fast chargers by any means.”

Some businesses and municipalities in the state are looking to ramp up the construction of public EV charging stations to meet growing demand. But a recent move by President Donald Trump’s administration could make doing so more difficult. On February 6, 2025, the Federal Highway Administration released a memo suspending the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, a resource supporting the construction of public EV infrastructure in states. The two phases of the program, spread over five years, award competitive grants of up to 80 percent federal funding for EV infrastructure projects along major roadways and in communities across the country. States are required to contribute the other 20 percent of costs, often through private investment. 

Reardon is the president of the White Mountains Attractions Association, which operates a visitor center at the entrance to the region in North Woodstock, New Hampshire. Travel and tourism make up the second largest sector in the state’s economy, and most visitors arrive by car. But New Hampshire’s slow approach to building public EV infrastructure could cost the state more than $1.4 billion in tourism revenue by 2031, Clean Energy NH and Ski NH found in a January 2025 study. 

The region that will be hardest hit is the White Mountains, which is projected to lose $353 million by 2031, according to the study, which was supported by the Environmental Defense Fund. 

With EVs projected to approach 30 percent of the cars on New England roads between now and the early 2030s, the study found that New Hampshire will fall behind neighboring Vermont and Maine—its key competitors in the regional tourism market—should it continue to lag in developing EV infrastructure. For Reardon, the need is already clear. Fast chargers are in the works at the visitor center where Reardon is based, located off Interstate 93, which connects Boston to the White Mountains. 

The memo from the Federal Highway Administration has caused confusion and concern among states and contractors hired to install projects, said Loren McDonald, chief analyst at Paren, an EV data platform tracking how states use federal funds for EV infrastructure. 

“There is no legal basis and authority to do this,” said McDonald. “It is all about creating havoc.” 

The NEVI program was established under the Inflation Reduction Act, a piece of legislation passed by Congress in 2022. To fundamentally change the NEVI program, Congress will need to revise the law. McDonald said he expects state attorneys general to prepare lawsuits against the memo in coordination with their departments of transportation and energy, which funnel NEVI funds to projects at the local level. 

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In the meantime, states are pausing parts of their NEVI programs. While New Hampshire has already been awarded $2.8 million in NEVI funding to build charging stations along major EV corridors as part of the program’s first phase, it is unclear whether it will see any funding for phase two of the program to build EV infrastructure in communities. 

A spokesman from New Hampshire’s Department of Transportation confirmed to the Daily Yonder that the state will continue with phase one NEVI sites as planned. The spokesman said phase two NEVI development is “on hold” until the state receives further guidance and direction from its federal partners.

Beyond phase one NEVI funding the Granite State has already invested into projects in the White Mountains and other regions, close to $30 million in federal funding has been greenlit for building public charging infrastructure along major roadways and in communities. That funding comes through the rest of the NEVI program and the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Grant Program, which was created by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. 

While the February 6 memo from the Federal Highway Administration says that reimbursement of “existing obligations” will be allowed, there is uncertainty as to which projects are considered to be “obligated,” given that the memo also suspends approvals for all plans for all years of the program. This comes as all states that have submitted their annual NEVI plans have received approval and obligation for four out of the program’s five years, McDonald said. 

“It’s a real head scratcher, because on one hand it’s saying, we’re going to reimburse for existing obligations, but it’s also saying we’re throwing out the first four years of the plans,” McDonald said.

‘Here in New England, people drive’

The White Mountain Attraction Association tallies 51 charging stations in the region, most of which are located at restaurants and lodging facilities. Ski areas like Loon Mountain Resort and Cranmore Mountain Resort have also invested in EV infrastructure, which tends to be more open to the public, Reardon said. 

“The North Country we often refer to as a charging desert, or ‘the donut hole,’” said Jessyca Keeler, president of Ski NH, one of the organizations associated with the tourism impact study. 

In a region known for its year-round recreational activities such as skiing, biking, and hiking, this poses a challenge for meeting visitors’ needs. 

“This is important for our industry because here in New England, people drive,” Keeler said.

In 2022, Massachusetts and Connecticut sent more than 4 million tourists to the Granite State out of 14.3 million total overnight visitors that year. Massachusetts sends the most visitors to the state of any place of origin, and in the winter, roughly half of all skiers come from the Bay State.

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Drivers in Massachusetts and Connecticut are also adopting EVs faster than their New Hampshire counterparts. Compared to New Hampshire’s small but growing population of EV drivers, 77 percent of all EVs in New England were operated by Massachusetts and Connecticut drivers in 2023, according to the study released by Clean Energy NH and Ski NH. By 2033, Massachusetts is expected to have 1.7 million EVs on the road while Connecticut is expected to have 600,000, compared to 200,000 vehicles projected in New Hampshire, the study found.

Assuming a “baseline scenario” where the Granite State installs 30 percent of the EV chargers needed to support tourism by early next decade, the study found that nearly 4 in 10 EV drivers and would-be tourists might not travel to the state due to “inadequate” charging infrastructure. This shortfall is behind the projected loss of  $1.4 billion in cumulative revenue that the study found could hit the state’s economy by 2031. 

That number is equivalent to losing an entire season of tourism, said Sam Evans-Brown, the executive director of Clean Energy NH. 

“Imagine if during one summer, no tourists came to New Hampshire at all,” said Evans-Brown. “That would be the biggest headline you would see.”

Evans-Brown and Keeler agree that at the state’s current pace, it will not be prepared to meet the demand for chargers from EV drivers coming from both in- and out-of-state. Both said they are prepared to advocate in favor of state-level policy changes to lower barriers for building the necessary public EV infrastructure for the tourism market. 

“When we’re talking to our legislators in this state, it’s really important to show the business case,” Keeler said. “When you start talking dollars and cents and the economy and tax revenues and those kinds of things, people listen on both sides of the fence.”

In a state known for its purple politics, ideological differences over EVs have slowed the state from adopting policies that would make charging infrastructure more affordable for businesses and small communities, Evans-Brown said. Meanwhile, neighboring states like Massachusetts have expanded incentives to build public charging stations through “Make-Ready” programs that anticipate a surge in EV drivers over the next decade. 

Evans-Brown said that Massachusetts justified its program by demonstrating that public EV infrastructure would help the state reach its climate goals. New Hampshire’s 2024 Priority Climate Action Plan references financing to support the development of public EV charging stations, though the state has yet to enact a “Make-Ready” program. 

If the state were to consider the number of EVs expected to be on the road in the early 2030s—given that adoption rates are projected to continue growing over the next ten years—Evans-Brown said the financial benefit would become clear. While the tourism impact study that Keeler and Evans-Brown worked on demonstrates how the Granite State’s economy could suffer from failing to install public EV infrastructure, a comprehensive look at what the state stands to gain has yet to be done. 

“You can justify these programs just on a cost basis if you do that kind of analysis,” Evans-Brown said. “But we haven’t gotten there yet.”

‘You build it and they will come’ 

In the state’s southwest corner, four spots in the Monadnock Food Co-op’s parking lot are now reserved for EV drivers looking to charge. Located in Keene, New Hampshire, some twenty minutes from both the Massachusetts and Vermont borders, the cooperatively-owned grocery store installed the chargers with the help of state funding in the spring of 2024.

“It just seemed like a perfect pairing for an EV driver to be able to use these charging stations while doing some grocery shopping or getting lunch or dinner, for example,” said Michael Faber, the co-op’s general manager.

The approximately $233,000 project to deploy the store’s chargers was financed by New Hampshire’s $30.9 million share of the Volkswagen Mitigation Trust. That pool of funding was established after Volkswagen settled with the federal government for its violations of the Clean Air Act in the 2010s. 

Since installing the charging station last year, Faber said the use has continued to grow. Travelers and locals alike have expressed appreciation for them, Faber said, as there are not many fast-charging options in the rural Monadnock region. 

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“You build it, and they will come,” said James Penfold, director of eMobility Solutions at ReVision Energy, the solar and EV charger installation company that the Monadnock Food Co-op partnered with on the charging station. 

Penfold, who has worked with organizations across northern New England on EV infrastructure, said that projects are often cost-prohibitive to install without government assistance. Level two chargers, which can fill a car to full charge in several hours, cost thousands of dollars. Level three fast chargers, which let drivers plug in for 20-30 minutes before driving away, start in the tens of thousands of dollars. Labor and installation with the utility adds to the total cost of deployment. 

“Even level twos, they’re relatively expensive to install, so it’s really disappointing for the state right now that there are no incentives to be able to encourage them and help defray some of that cost,” Penfold said.

In the northern part of the state, Charyl Reardon expressed a similar sentiment. She said the upfront costs to install public EV chargers are unfeasible for many local businesses and municipalities in the White Mountains, even if they recoup the money later. 

For New Hampshire’s rural communities, uncertainties about the future of federal funding loom over plans to build EV infrastructure. Most of the grants at the state level, like the $2.8 million in NEVI funding or the award from the Volkswagen Mitigation Trust, originate from the federal government. 

The Trump administration’s attempts to freeze federal spending—which continue to be challenged in courts—has left the future of that funding unclear. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rural New England needs EV chargers for tourism. The Trump administration is making it harder to build them.  on Feb 23, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Julia Tilton, The Daily Yonder.

Janine Jackson interviewed Dartmouth-based Anne Sosin about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and rural health for the February 7, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

The Hill (1/13/25)

Janine Jackson: A Senate panel voted narrowly this week to advance the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has been emphatically opposed by a range of public health experts for reasons including, but not limited to, his stated belief that vaccines have “poisoned an entire generation of American children.” Yes, his children are vaccinated, but he wishes he “could go back in time” and undo that.

Also, that Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people, while Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese are most immune; that the HPV vaccine causes a higher death risk than the cancer it prevents; that fluoride causes IQ loss; that Vitamin A and chicken soup are cures for measles; that AIDS is not caused by HIV; and that we had almost no school shootings until the introduction of Prozac.

Nevertheless, Kennedy may soon be overseeing Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, coordinating the public health response to epidemics, as well as the approval process for pharmaceuticals, vaccines and supplies.

Our guest says RFK Jr is absolutely a threat to public health, but nixing his nomination is not the same thing as meaningfully engaging the problems that lead people to support him.

Anne Sosin is a public health researcher and practitioner based at Dartmouth College. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Anne Sosin.

Anne Sosin: Thank you so much for having me on the show.

FAIR.org (12/5/24)

JJ: There are a number of people, in lots of places, who have centered their lives perforce on concerns around food and health and medicine. And they see a guy who seems to be challenging Big Pharma, who’s saying food additives are problematic, who’s questioning government agencies. There are a lot of people who are so skeptical of the US healthcare and drug system that a disruptor, even if it’s somebody who says a worm ate his brain—that sounds better than business as usual. And so that’s leading some people to think, well, maybe we can pick out some good ideas here, maybe. But you think that is the wrong approach to RFK Jr.

AS: I think that that’s misguided. Certainly, there are some people who see RFK as a vehicle for championing their causes. And there are other people who think that we should seek common ground with RFK, that we should acquiesce, perhaps, on certain issues, and then work together to advance some other causes.

And I think that that’s misguided. I think we need to recognize what’s given rise to RFK and other extreme figures right now, but we need to make common cause with the communities that he’s exploiting in advancing his own personal and political goals.

JJ: And in particular, you’re thinking about rural communities, which have played a role here, right? What’s going on there?

AS: Yes. My work is centered in rural communities right now, and I think we need to understand the political economy that’s given rise to RFK and other figures—the social, economic, cultural and political changes that have given him a wide landing strip in rural places, as well as some of the institutional vacuums that RFK and other very extreme and polarizing figures are filling.

JJ: Expand on that, please, a little.

Anne Sosin: “Resistance to public health measures often, in my view, reflects unmet need.”

AS: So we’re seeing growing resistance in some places, including rural communities, to public health and interventions that have long been in place, including vaccination and fluoridation. And resistance to public health measures often, in my view, reflects unmet need.

Sometimes those needs are material. We see that people resist or don’t follow public health programs or guidance because they don’t have their material needs met. And those material needs might be housing, paid leave or other supports that they need. But the unmet need might also be emotional or affective, that some people may resist out of a sense of economic or social dislocation, a feeling of invisibility, or something else. And those feelings get expressed as resistance to public health measures that are in place.

And so understanding and recognizing what those unmet needs are is really important. And then thinking about how do we address those needs in ways that are productive, and don’t undermine public health and healthcare, is really important.

JJ: Vaccinations are obviously a big concern here, particularly as we may be going into another big public health concern with bird flu. So the idea that vaccines cause disease is difficult to grapple with, from a public health perspective. Vaccines can’t be a “choose your own adventure” if they’re going to work societally. And it almost seems like, around vaccination, we’re losing the concept of what public health means, and how it’s not about whether or not you decide to eat cheese, you know? There’s kind of a public understanding issue here.

AS: I think you’re correct. I think we’ve seen, just in the US, an increasing DIYification of public health, a loss of the recognition that public health means all of us. Public health is the things that we do together to advance our collective health. And the increased focus on individual decision-making really threatens all of us.

NPR (5/12/21)

And we look for it around vaccination: We have seen very well-funded initiatives to undermine public confidence in vaccination over the last several years. There has been a lot of money spent to dismantle public support and public confidence in vaccination and other lifesaving measures. And it really poses a grave threat, as we think about not only novel threats like H5N1, but also things that have long been under control.

JJ: Finally, I took a quick look at major national media and rural healthcare, and there wasn’t nothing. I saw a piece from the Dayton Daily News about heart disease in the rural South, and how public health researchers are running a medical trailer around the area to test heart and lung function. I saw a piece from the Elko Daily Free Press in Nevada about how Elko County and others are reliant on nonprofits to fill gaps in access to care, and that’s partly due to poor communication between state agencies and local providers.

And I really appreciate local reporting; local reporting is life. But some healthcare issues, and certainly some of those that would be impacted by the head of HHS, are broader, and they require a broad understanding of the impact of policy on lots of communities. And I just wonder, is there something you would like to see news media do more of that they’re missing? Is there something you’d like them to see less of, as they try to engage these issues, as they will, in days going forward?

AS: Certainly local coverage is essential, and I’m really pleased when I see local coverage of the heroic work that many rural healthcare providers and community leaders are delivering. We see very creative and innovative work happening in our rural region, in our research, in our community engagement. And so it’s very encouraging when I see that covered.

But all of the efforts on the ground are shaped by a larger policy landscape and a larger media landscape, larger political landscape. And what we see, often, is efforts to undermine the policies that are critical to preserving our rural healthcare infrastructure. We see well-funded media efforts to erode social cohesion, to undermine our community institutions, to sow mistrust in measures such as vaccination. We see other work to harden the divisions between urban and rural America, and within rural places.

And so I hope that media will pay attention to the larger forces that are shaping the landscape of rural life, and not just see the outcome. It’s easy to take note of the disparities between urban and rural places, but it’s much harder to do the deep and complex work of understanding the forces that generate those uneven outcomes across geographic differences.

JJ: All right, well, we’ll end on that important point.

We’ve been speaking with Anne Sosin, public health researcher and practitioner based at Dartmouth College. Anne Sosin, thank you so much for joining us today on CounterSpin.

AS: Thank you for the invitation.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

(CC photo: Ted Eytan)

This week on CounterSpin: We know that once corporate news label something “controversial,” we’re in for reporting with a static “some say/others differ” frame—even if one “side” of the “controversy” is a relatively small group of people who don’t believe in science or human rights or democracy. So as the Trump White House comes out fast and furious against transgender people, their weird hatefulness lands in a public arena that generally rejects discrimination, but also in an elite media climate in which the very lives of transgender people have long been deemed “subject to debate.” We’ll hear about the current state of things from civil rights attorney Ezra Young.

New York Times (5/8/24)

Also on the show: When the New York Times reported Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s revelation that parasites have eaten part of his brain, Kennedy, running for president at the time, offered to “eat five more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate.” We’re reminded of such “jokes” now, as Kennedy looks likely to be head of Health and Human Services, along with his claims that vaccines cause autism and chicken soup cures measles. But to resist Kennedy, we need to understand what fuels those who, even if they don’t like him, believe he might be a force for good in their lives. Anne Sosin is a public health researcher and practitioner based at Dartmouth College, who encourages looking around RFK Jr. to the communities that imagine he’s speaking for them.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capitol News Illinois. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Sixty percent of rural Americans live in child care deserts — regions with too few licensed slots for children. In rural Illinois, that number rises to nearly 70%.

Over the past decade, Illinois has experienced a 33% decline in licensed child care providers, losing nearly 4,300 facilities and about 38,000 licensed slots for children. This loss, driven by years of budget cuts, has outpaced the shrinking child population and hit rural areas the hardest. In 2019, during his first year in office, Gov. JB Pritzker acknowledged that rural providers were closing at an “alarming rate” and vowed to make Illinois the “best state in the nation for families raising young children.”

While the state has increased payments to providers in recent years, it hasn’t been enough to reverse the damage caused by years of budget cuts. The COVID-19 pandemic further destabilized the already fragile system. Despite additional state and federal funding, Illinois has lost about 1,300 providers since Pritzker took office.

But opening new facilities is hard, and the government itself makes things harder. Here are five reasons it’s difficult to open and operate new child care centers in Illinois:

Experts say that launching a child care center can cost upwards of $1 million, even in rural areas, where people tend to assume that it’s cheaper to start a small business. It’s true that properties may be less expensive than in urban areas, but they are often harder to find in regions with little new construction and many old buildings requiring costly repairs.

The largest source of child care funding in America comes from the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant funds administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But most of it goes to offset child care payments for low-income parents; only a few exceptions allow spending federal funds on the buildings themselves.

Federal efforts to ease these startup costs for rural regions include a proposed expansion of loans and grants through the Department of Agriculture, but this measure remains tied up in Congress as part of the long-delayed new farm bill.

Rebuild Illinois is a $45 billion, multiyear capital improvement plan that was passed in 2019, the state’s first such plan in nearly a decade. Through it, the state allocated $100 million for early childhood facilities. But in the first round of funding, only eight programs out of 238 applicants received a combined $55 million in January 2023, with most grants awarded in Chicago and suburban areas. No providers in the southern half of the state received funding. A second $45 million round is planned, but no timeline has been announced.

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, which oversees child care licensing, is grappling with a staffing crisis. The agency has a 20% vacancy rate for licensing staff and 45% for supervisors, who must review and approve all applications for child care providers.

Navigating Illinois’ complex licensing rules can be hard, and providers say they can’t always get the information they need in a timely manner. Some say their applications have been caught in limbo for months or weeks without explanation. According to DCFS’ own report to the General Assembly, the agency misses its 90-day deadline to approve applications about a third of the time — and in regions with severe staffing shortages, that rate can rise above 50%. Although licensing will soon transfer to the newly created Department of Early Childhood, most changes won’t begin until mid-2026, and what impact they will have on providers is not yet clear.

While DCFS acknowledges the staffing shortages, the agency also attributes delays to provider paperwork errors and holdups from other agencies, like the state fire marshal or local officials.

Illinois’ child care regulations, though intended to protect children, include outdated and contradictory rules that frustrate providers. For instance, one regulation requires blankets in every crib, even though the state prohibits blanket use for sleeping infants to reduce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. Another rule requires that providers carry coins on walks to use a payphone in emergencies — a relic from a pre-cellphone era.

Providers say that inconsistencies in the rules further complicate an already difficult process for opening and operating child care centers. A DCFS spokesperson told Capitol News Illinois that the agency is working to update some regulations.

The federal Child Care and Development Block Grant is the largest source of child care funding in the U.S. It is administered by states and helps eligible low-income families offset the high cost of child care. The money is paid directly to providers, and the federal government mandates that states reimburse providers at least 50% of market rates and recommends a higher benchmark of 75%. However, Illinois falls short of both targets. As of April 2023, the state reimbursed less than 45% of market rates for child care centers, one of the largest gaps nationwide. This underfunding violated federal equal access provisions, though state officials said that recent subsidy increases have brought Illinois into compliance in most categories.

Rural providers face additional hurdles beyond inadequate reimbursement rates. High startup costs and lower population density make it harder to fill classrooms quickly, prolonging financial strain. Even providers offering unsubsidized care struggle to set fees that reflect the true cost of operations, as many families who barely earn too much to receive a subsidy cannot afford to pay higher rates.

This persistent funding gap leaves providers, particularly those in rural areas, in a difficult financial position.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Molly Parker, Capitol News Illinois.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capitol News Illinois. _A portion of the reporting in Alexander County is supported by funding from the Pulitzer Center. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Heather and Stephen Casner sat across from the loan officer in the fall of 2022, a stack of papers between them. The building they were trying to buy — a 21-room, one-story motel in rural Anna, Illinois — was overflowing with trash and would need a complete overhaul before they could reopen it as a child care center in a region where there were almost no such facilities. But after a long search, it was the best option they could find.

The Casners were about to sign the papers for a $600,000 loan, using their house as collateral and setting aside $200,000 from Stephen’s retirement to cover what the loan wouldn’t. It was a staggering sum in a southern Illinois town where the per capita income is about $25,000 — 40% below the national level. “I’ve never even seen that much money,” Heather said. “I wasn’t raised that way.”

But Heather, who grew up on a farm just up the road, channeled her late father’s philosophy: “My daddy always used to say he was going to just keep farming until the money runs out.”

With a firm handshake, they were the new owners of a 1950s relic, the Plaza Motel.

The clock on the project was already ticking: In order to survive financially, they’d need to start enrolling children within six months. They knew it would be tough, but they soon would be shocked by the magnitude of the challenges ahead.

Over the past decade, Illinois has lost nearly 4,300 licensed child care providers, a 33% decline. As a result, it has also lost nearly 38,000 licensed child care slots for kids, outpacing the rate at which the child population is shrinking.

In 2019, at the end of his first year in office, Gov. JB Pritzker acknowledged that child care providers in rural Illinois were closing at an “alarming rate” and promised to make Illinois the “best state in the nation for families raising young children.” In response, the state increased its payments to providers. But that funding had been slashed in previous years amid a state budget crisis, and the extra boost was too little, too late. When COVID-19 hit, those that were already fragile folded.

With increased state and federal funding, the closures have now slowed slightly, but Illinois has still lost roughly 1,300 providers since Pritzker took office.

Over several months, Capitol News Illinois spoke with more than 50 parents, employers and child care experts to understand how the child care crisis has reshaped their lives.

Jala Wilson, 25, works with adults with developmental disabilities and attends nursing school. She has struggled to find care for two children. Her older son has behavioral challenges and his public school can’t accommodate him full time. And for her younger son, she couldn’t find child care nearby: Before the Casners opened the Our World of Learning Child Development Center, she was driving 100 miles round trip each day for child care. She spent more than a year getting up at 5 a.m. to drop off her younger son before heading to her nursing classes in the opposite direction. At night, she did it all in reverse. “That was insane,” she said. “I’d pick them up by 5 p.m., cook dinner, get them in the bathtub and do homework after they go to bed. So I probably would stay up until about midnight.” Gas alone cost her $600 a month. “If OWL closed, honestly, I’d probably drop out of school.”

People who have sought to open new facilities say they’ve faced monumental difficulties, especially in rural areas where properties are scarce and often require costly repairs. Launching a child care center, even in rural areas, can cost upwards of $1 million, experts say. “We typically think about the cost of care as being much less in our rural communities, and I think that’s a false narrative,” said Ariel Ford, a senior vice president with Child Care Aware of America, a national advocacy organization.

Adding to the difficulties in Illinois, prospective providers say they struggle to navigate a maze of complex requirements largely on their own, leading to delays in opening. They also point to regulations that are contradictory or outdated. One directs providers to place a blanket in every crib, even though the state prohibits using blankets to reduce the risk of SIDS. The state also directs providers to carry coins on walks so they can use a pay phone in an emergency, a relic Heather Casner called “ridiculous.”

Providers also say their applications can get stuck in limbo for weeks or months, with little explanation for the delays or news about when they’ll be licensed. The state’s own data supports this claim: For more than a third of applicants, the state misses its 90-day timeline to approve applications.

Part of the challenge is that the Illinois offices that oversee child care centers are severely short staffed, with a roughly 20% vacancy rate. On average, each state licensing representative is responsible for about 120 facilities, while the National Association for the Education of Young Children recommends a caseload of 50. “Is a rep with 150 cases going to take 30 minutes to explain, step by step, how to fill out a form for somebody? It’s possible,” said Janet O’Connell, a 30-year veteran of the Department of Children and Family Services who recently started a consulting business, Licensing Navigators, to help providers find their way through the system. “But when you’ve got 149 other day care providers tugging at your coat, it’s really hard.”

“The application timeline and the timeline to actually open would shock you,” said Jill Andrews, a longtime child care provider and president of the Southern Illinois Early Childhood Action Team, a nonprofit child care advocacy organization. Centers must hire staff before opening, but without a clear timeline for when they will be allowed to open, she said, they often end up paying staff for weeks or months while waiting for clearance. “Most get into so much unnecessary additional debt due to the long process.”

Child care is urgently needed throughout the country, but particularly so outside urban areas. In one of the few nationwide studies of child care access, the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, found that about 60% of rural Americans live in a child care desert — a region with too few licensed child care spots for the children who live there. In rural Illinois, it’s nearly 70%.

Parents in southern Illinois said they have been forced to rely on a patchwork of family and neighbors, drive long distances — sometimes over 100 miles — or bring children to work. Some have left the workforce, unable to find affordable care.

Alex Gough, a spokesperson for Pritzker, said that since the governor took office in 2019, the state has expanded access to subsidized child care, sought to stabilize the industry with cash infusions during the pandemic, and started the Smart Start grant program to raise worker wages and provide ongoing support as federal pandemic assistance runs dry — one of only 11 states to do so.

Pritzker has also promised to streamline the state’s red tape with a new Department of Early Childhood. But most changes won’t begin until mid-2026, and what impact they will have on providers is not yet clear. Additionally, Illinois’ child care system relies heavily on federal funding, and there could be significant changes under the new Trump administration. But what he’ll do is unclear: In his first term, President Donald Trump both sought deep cuts to child care subsidies and touted historic increases.

Heather Casner said that throughout the licensing process, she felt “alone in the middle of an ocean, just bobbing and looking for land.” Opening a child care center had long been her dream. After graduating with a degree in early childhood education, she faced a job market that couldn’t pay the bills. Instead, she took a job working with troubled teens. “I loved them,” she said, but their struggles reminded her of her true calling: “I’m like, man, if I had known you earlier, you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t have thought you were worth nothing.”

The Casners intended to serve families across four rural Illinois counties, among the poorest regions in the state. According to the plan they developed with a business expert at a local university, they would need 48 children enrolled for a full year to break even.

“And this looked good, on paper,” Stephen said.

“On paper,” Heather echoed.

People talk about the Illinois divide: Chicagoland and the rest of the state. But in far southern Illinois, the economic chasm widens and becomes more visible near Anna, where the Casners bought their motel. The back roads wind past struggling towns, crumbling buildings and boarded-up storefronts, toward the state’s southernmost tip, which The Wall Street Journal called the fastest-shrinking place in America.

Here, infrastructure and vital services are vanishing at an alarming pace. In recent years, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has demolished four public housing complexes, displacing hundreds of people, while flooding forced others out. Grocery stores disappeared too, creating a food desert until Rise Community Market opened in Cairo in 2023. That facility is now temporarily closed, but the founders are planning a reopening.

For parents of young children, life here can be especially daunting. And that has been true for a long time: Heather faced the same shortages 30 years ago when she returned to work when her daughter was 9 months old.

What finally made her plan possible was Stephen. The couple had been dating off and on for 10 years when Stephen learned in 2014, at 40, that he had early-onset Parkinson’s disease. Not long after, Stephen popped the question. He was also determined to get her business off the ground.

“I had a little bit of extra money,” he said. He could have spent it on himself, but he remembers thinking, “Somebody has to care about the families around here.”

The first challenge they encountered was finding a building. The region hasn’t seen much new construction for decades, and in each place they found, their licensing representative from the Department of Children and Family Services pointed out problems that would cost more to fix than they could afford.

Searches like the Casners’ for an affordable building in decent condition are “incredibly common, especially in rural communities,” said Brittany Walsh, senior associate director at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank that has focused on the rural child care crisis. The largest source of child care funding in America comes from the federal Child Care and Development Block Grantfunds administered by the Department of Health and Human Services. But most of it goes to offset payments for low-income parents; only a few exceptions allow spending federal funds on the buildings themselves.

A proposed expansion of loans and grants from the Department of Agriculture that rural child care providers could use to offset steep startup costs is pending in Congress, Walsh said. But it’s tied up in the long-delayed new farm bill.

Illinois has sought to help but has barely made a dent. The multiyear Rebuild Illinois infrastructure program, launched in 2019, included $100 million for early childhood facilities. But in the first round of funding, 238 applicants vied for grants with only eight programs receiving $55 million between them in January 2023. Most of those were in Chicago and its suburbs, and no grants went to any providers in the bottom half of the state. A second, $45 million funding round is forthcoming, though no timeline has been given, according to the Capital Development Board.

Stephen was the first to spot the listing for the old Plaza Motel, built by community leaders decades ago during a boom era for this Midwestern factory-and-farm town.

When they went to visit, the place smelled musty, with soiled carpeting and midcentury wood paneling. The broken furniture, old clothing, drug paraphernalia and stacks of lottery tickets inside would eventually become 22 truckloads of trash. A decrepit shack where squatters had lived sat where the Casners envisioned the playground.

But it did have some things going for it, including its manageable size and flat playground area. Heather invited their Department of Children and Family Services representative to walk through it with her again.

“I talked to the DCFS person, and she’s like, ‘Oh, I love it. I can see it. This works,’” Heather recalled with a chuckle. “And I’m like, Really, all those other places for two years didn’t work, but an old run-down motel, you’re like, ‘Yes, this is where the kids need to be’?”

Heather is drawn to things that sparkle and shine, like bedazzled clothing and glittery nail polish, and she has a contagious laugh that can fill a room. In September 2022, in her typical upbeat fashion — her short bob of curly hair dancing in the breeze — Heather took to Facebook Live to share her vision: “In this great building behind us, we are going to be able to have students from 6 weeks old to 6 years old in hopefully a matter of three months!”

Things didn’t go as planned. It turned out that years-old fire damage had left hidden destruction in the interior walls. Then they paid the water bill and turned the water on for the first time: “The building started crying,” Stephen recalled. For a time, the prior owners had not heated the building but had left the water on, causing the pipes to burst. The entire plumbing system had to be replaced.

Each day brought new costs: $47,000 for an HVAC system; $170,000 to the general contractor; $130,000 to stock the playground and furnish the building.

They tapped into part of the $200,000 taken from Stephen’s retirement account and borrowed additional money from Stephen’s dad. They quickly blew through their budget and their timeline — and then some.

They also pored over rules, highlighters in hand. They needed articles of organization, operating agreements, budgets, staffing plans, job descriptions and the details of every teacher’s and aide’s educational background. Then there were lesson plans, radon measurements, lead tests, plumbing and fire safety checks, and blueprints, each done according to very specific requirements where any mistakes would set them back months more.

“Everybody jokes that all of our rules have been written by some 85-year-old man who never dealt with kids a day in his life because that’s how it reads,” Heather said. The back-and-forth with their DCFS licensing representative felt endless, correcting paperwork, resubmitting forms that got lost in the shuffle, hoping each submission would be the last one.

In December 2022, Heather wrote to her licensing representative: “I am hoping for a March opening. Eventually I need some money coming in on this deal instead of just flying out.”

In February, Heather started interviewing staff and preparing to open. It was admittedly a leap of faith, but the system is also a catch-22 for providers: They can’t predict when their license will be approved, yet they need to complete background checks and hire staffers for each classroom before that can happen. This can take weeks to months because of teacher shortages and the often-lengthy process for background checks.

March came and went.

In April, she informed DCFS of their plan for a grand opening of the Our World of Learning Child Development Center, which the Casners called OWL for short, on May 22, hoping that would encourage DCFS to complete her paperwork. But that day, too, came and went without a license approval.

DCFS’ licensing division, chronically understaffed for years, currently faces a 20% vacancy rate. There’s a 45% vacancy rate for supervisors, who must review and approve all license applications. A DCFS spokesperson said the agency is working to fill vacancies in its licensing division, but said delays are not due to staff shortages but rather are the result of a range of issues including missing paperwork from applicants.

Providers frequently post on a Facebook page, Illinois Child Care in Crisis, about frustrating delays. One woman told Capitol News Illinois she has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into expanding her Chicago-based child care business into suburban Oswego only to be stuck in limbo for months awaiting approval of her licence while paying a full staff.

“I’m paying people to sit around and do nothing,” Doyin Ajilore said in late November. She has been paying a center director since August and several teachers since September. She received her license on Dec. 13. But Ajilore said the delays still forced her to borrow additional funding. Heather, however, couldn’t afford to pay her staff until children enrolled. And she couldn’t enroll children without DCFS’ final approval. When Stephen’s patience ran out, he made an angry phone call, demanding the licensing representative finalize the paperwork. Heather still shudders when she remembers that call. But by the following week, DCFS signed off on their license.

It was late July by this point, and by then most of their staff had lined up other jobs. They scrambled to rehire staff.

OWL’s doors finally opened on July 31, 2023, the place filled with pint-sized tables and chairs, shelves stocked with brightly colored toys and books for playing and learning. They’d transformed the old motel into an inviting space decorated with owls, their license now proudly on display near the entrance.

But the problems didn’t end. A few months before opening, Heather had asked parents on Facebook to add their names to a form if they were interested in care. The response seemed promising: Nearly 100 parents put their names down. When the Casners opened OWL, there were only two other centers serving children in an area with about 2,600 kids under 6. But filling classrooms still took months, a common issue in rural areas, experts said, because parents may live far away, be unaware of a new facility or need time to secure a job if they’re returning to the workforce.

The Casners’ business plan had little margin for error, especially given the subsidy payments they were relying on.

Illinois has long faced issues with its subsidies, which the state pays to child care providers on behalf of low-income families who qualify. The federal Administration for Children and Families recommends that states pay providers 75% of the market rate for care, but Illinois pays less than 45% for child care centers, according to federal data from April 2023, the latest available. That was one of the largest gaps in the nation, and it violated the equal access provision of the federal government’s block grant funding program, according to a news release from the federal agency. State officials noted that the data lags behind recent subsidy increases and said Illinois is now compliant in all but one category.

Providers could charge parents who receive these subsidies additional fees to help make up the difference, but most — including the Casners — don’t, knowing that many parents simply can’t afford it.

Today, a year and a half after opening, OWL is at just over half capacity, serving about 45 children. The vast majority of their care is paid for by government subsidies, and the center would need to maintain that population for a full year to break even.

Several OWL parents have no backup plan if Heather’s center doesn’t survive. Before the center opened, Jala Wilson of Carbondale had spent over a year driving 100 miles a day to drop her son at child care, head to her nursing classes in the opposite direction, and then do it again in reverse at pickup time. She spent $600 a month on gas alone. “That was insane, but it’s what I had to do,” she said.

Rachel Clover, another OWL mom, is effusive. Her daughter’s father died by suicide last summer, and Heather treated her and her daughter, 3-year-old Aizlyn, kindly. “They’ve been there for me emotionally,” she said, adding that having child care has allowed her to work full-time as an aide for the elderly and disabled. “It’s given me a chance to be more than just a welfare mom,” she said.

When Rachel Clover, 36, talks about OWL, she breaks down in tears. She’s been on her own with two girls, ages 8 and 3, since her fiancé died by suicide last summer, and child care had already been a battle for years — Clover said she had to pull her older daughter out of another facility after she was left sitting in the same diaper all day. Clover tried working nights while family and friends watched the kids, but it left her frazzled and sleep deprived, and she ultimately switched jobs. When OWL opened just a few miles from her public housing in Jonesboro, it felt like a godsend. “Heather never said anything if I was late for pickup because I just needed a moment to breathe,” she said. “I don’t want to get all choked up, but it’s true. Without having somewhere safe for my daughter to be, I won’t be able to work, I won’t be able to survive.”

Heather feels this pressure profoundly. Originally she had planned to pay herself a salary of $40,000, but since opening in July, she has yet to take a full paycheck. Every two weeks, she prays that there’s enough for payroll, and her staff has never missed a check. In early October, she was $1,000 short. To pay her staff, Heather had to transfer funds from an account that barely covered her $4,000 mortgage. Paying back Stephen’s retirement account seems out of reach. “Steve and I are broke by now,” Heather said. “And all of our future money is gone.”

Heather blinks a lot when she’s stressed, and there’s been a lot more blinking lately. “I can’t give up,” she said. She plans to keep the center open until the money runs dry, just as her father did with his farm.

“Sure,” Stephen added, “until she drops dead just trying to make a go.”

“Yep,” she concurred, “Just to make it go one more day.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

Then Valle began to suspect water from her well was making her sick.

“Even if everything is organic, it doesn’t matter, if the water underground is not clean,” Valle said.

This year, researchers found worrisome levels of chemicals called PFAS in her well water. Exposure to PFAS, a group of thousands of compounds, has been linked to health problems including cancer, decreased response to vaccines, and low birth weight, according to a federally funded report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Valle worries that eating food from her farm and drinking the water, found also to contain arsenic, are to blame for health issues she’s experienced recently.

The researchers suspect the toxic chemicals could have made their way into Valle’s water through nearby agricultural operations, which may have used PFAS-laced fertilizers made from dried sludge from wastewater treatment plants, or pesticides found to contain the compounds.

The chemicals have unexpectedly turned up in well water in rural farmland far from known contamination sites, like industrial areas, airports, and military bases. Agricultural communities already face the dangers of heavy metals and nitrates contaminating their tap water. Now researchers worry that PFAS could further harm farmworkers and communities of color disproportionately. They have called for more testing.

“It seems like it’s an even more widespread problem than we realized,” said Clare Pace, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley who is examining possible exposure from PFAS-contaminated pesticides.

Concerns are mounting nationwide about PFAS contamination transferred through the common practice of spreading solid waste from sewage treatment across farm fields. Officials in Maine outlawed spreading “biosolids,” as some sewage byproducts are called, on farms and other land in 2022. A study published in August found higher levels of PFAS in the blood of people in Maine who drank water from wells next to farms where biosolids were spread.

Contamination in sewage mostly comes from industrial discharges. But household sludge also contains PFAS, because the chemicals are prevalent in personal care products and other commonly used items, said Sarah Alexander, executive director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association.

“We found that farms that were spread with sludge in the ’80s are still contaminated today,” Alexander said.

The first PFAS, or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, were invented in the 1940s to prevent stains and sticking in household products. Today, PFAS chemicals are used in everything from cookware to cosmetics to some types of firefighting foam — ending up in landfills and wastewater treatment plants. Known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down in the environment, PFAS are so toxic that in water they are measured in parts per trillion, equivalent to one drop in 20 Olympic-size swimming pools. The chemicals accumulate in the human body.

On Valle’s farm, her well water has PFAS concentrations eight times as high as the safety threshold the Environmental Protection Agency set this year for the PFAS chemical referred to as PFOS, or perfluorooctane sulfonate. It’s unclear whether the new drinking water standards, which are in a five-year implementation phase, will be enforced by the incoming Trump administration.

Valle’s well is one of 20 sites tested in California’s San Joaquin Valley and Central Coast regions — 10 private domestic wells and 10 public water systems — in the first round of preliminary sampling by UC-Berkeley researchers and the Community Water Center, a clean-water nonprofit. They’re planning community meetings to discuss the findings with residents when the results are finalized. Valle’s results showed 96 parts per trillion of total PFAS in her water, including 32 ppt of PFOS — both considered potentially hazardous amounts.

Hailey Shingler, who was part of the team that conducted the water sampling, said the sites’ proximity to farmland suggests agricultural operations could be a contamination source, or that the chemicals have become ubiquitous in the environment.

The EPA requires public water systems serving at least 3,300 people to test for 29 types of PFAS. But private wells are unregulated and particularly vulnerable to contamination from groundwater, because they tend to be shallower and construction quality varies, Shingler said.

California already faces a drinking water crisis that disproportionately hits farmworkers and communities of color. More than 825,000 people spanning almost 400 water systems across the state don’t have access to clean or reliable drinking water because of contamination from nitrates, heavy metals, and pesticides.

California’s Central Valley is one of the nation’s biggest agricultural producers. State data shows the EPA found PFAS contamination above the new safety threshold in public drinking water supplies in some cities there: Fresno, Lathrop, Manteca, and others.

Not long after she moved, Valle started feeling sick. Joints in her legs hurt, and there was a burning sensation. Medical tests revealed her blood had high levels of heavy metals, especially arsenic, she said. She plans to get herself tested for PFAS soon, too.

“So I stopped eating [or drinking] anything from the farm,” Valle said, “and a week later my numbers went down.”

After that, she got a water filter installed for her house, but the system doesn’t remove PFAS, so she and her family continue to drink bottled water, she said.

In recent years, the pesticide industry has increased its use of PFAS for both active and “inert” ingredients, said David Andrews, a senior scientist of the Environmental Working Group, who analyzed pesticide ingredient registrations submitted to the EPA over the past decade as part of a recently published study.

“PFAS not only endanger agricultural workers and communities,” Andrews said, “but also jeopardize downstream water sources, where pesticide runoff can contaminate drinking supplies.”

California’s most concentrated pesticide use is along the Central Coast, where Valle lives, and in the Central Valley, said Pace, whose research found that possible PFAS contamination from pesticides disproportionately affects communities of color.

“Our results indicate racial and ethnic disparities in potential PFAS threats to community water systems, thus raising environmental justice concerns,” the paper states.

Some treatment plants and public water systems have installed filtration systems to catch PFAS, but that can cost millions or even billions of dollars. California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed laws restricting PFAS in textiles, food packaging, and cosmetics, a move the wastewater treatment industry hopes will address the problem at the source.

Yet the state, like the EPA, does not regulate PFAS in the solid waste generated by sewage treatment plants, though it does require monitoring.

In the past, biosolids were routinely sent to landfills alongside being spread on land. But in 2016, California lawmakers passed a regulation that requested operators to lower their organic waste disposal by 75 percent by 2025 to reduce methane emissions. That squeeze pushed facilities to repurpose more of their wastewater treatment byproducts as fertilizer, compost, and soil topper on farm fields, forests, and other sites.

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Greg Kester, director of renewable resource programs at the California Association of Sanitation Agencies, said there are benefits to using biosolids as fertilizer, including improved soil health, increased crop yields, reduced irrigation needs, and carbon sequestration. “We have to look at the risk of not applying [it on farmland] as well,” he said.

Almost two-thirds of the 776,000 dry metric tons of biosolids California used or disposed of last year was spread this way, most of it hauled from wealthy, populated regions like Los Angeles County and the Bay Area to the Central Valley or out of state.

When asked if California would consider banning biosolids from agricultural use, Wendy Linck, a senior engineering geologist at California’s State Water Resources Control Board, said: “I don’t think that is in the future.”

Average PFAS concentrations found in California’s sampling of biosolids for PFAS collected by wastewater treatment plants are relatively low compared with more industrialized states like Maine, said Rashi Gupta, wastewater practice director at consulting firm Carollo Engineers.

Still, according to monitoring done in 2020 and 2022, San Francisco’s two wastewater treatment facilities produced biosolid samples with total PFAS levels of more than 150 parts per billion.

Starting in 2019, the water board began testing wells — and finding high levels of PFAS — near known sites of contamination, like airports, landfills, and industry.

The agency is now testing roughly 4,000 wells statewide, including those far from known contamination sources — free of charge in disadvantaged communities, according to Dan Newton, assistant deputy director at the state water board’s division of drinking water. The effort will take about two years.

Solano County — home to large pastures about an hour northeast of San Francisco — tested soil where biosolids had been applied to its fields, most of which came from the Bay Area. In preliminary results, consultants found PFAS at every location, including places where biosolids had historically not been applied. In recent years, landowners expressed reservations about the county’s biosolids program, and in 2024 no farms participated in the practice, said Trey Strickland, manager of the environmental health services division.

“It was probably a ‘not in my backyard’ kind of thing,” Strickland said. “Spread the poop somewhere else, away from us.”

Los Angeles County, meanwhile, hauls much of its biosolids to Kern County or out of state. Green Acres, a farm near Bakersfield and owned by the city of Los Angeles, has applied as much as 80,000 dry tons of biosolids annually, fertilizing crops for animal feed like corn and wheat. Concerned about the environmental and health implications, for more than a decade Kern County fought the practice until the legal battle ended in 2017. At the time, Dean Florez, a former state senator, told the Los Angeles Times that “it’s been a David and Goliath battle from day one.”

“We probably won’t know the effects of this for many years,” he added. “We do know one thing: If it was healthy and OK, L.A. would do it in L.A. County.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Toxic ‘forever chemicals’ taint rural California drinking water, far from known sources on Dec 15, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Hannah Norman, KFF Health News.

The flooding that devastated western North Carolina during Hurricane Helene laid waste to communities all around the region, spitting up great torrents of mud and washing away homes, cars, and people. The landscape along the creeks and mountainsides has been forever changed. 

Beyond the fallen trees, sliding hillsides, and damaged buildings, Helene took out critical infrastructure, like internet and electricity, water, and sewer. Everyone would have liked more time to get things in order, but working families were desperate for childcare and the desire to resume classes was too great. “We had to get open,” Rambo said. “The kids needed some routine and structure and consistency, and families needed to go back to work.”

Although folks in Spruce Pine were told Thursday they could finally stop boiling water before using it, the school still can’t flush its toilets because the sewers remain a mess. In addition to two portable toilets (and special seats so the smaller children wouldn’t fall in), it has had to buy water by the barrel and spend $600 to install portable hand-washing sinks. The bills continue adding up: $360 per week for the johns and $350 every time they need emptying. Everyone has had to adjust to these changes and more, even as they’ve dealt with similar problems at home.

It’s been that way everywhere. The storm killed 103 people throughout western North Carolina and surrounding areas. Many more were injured. All told, the wind and the water damaged as many as 126,000 homes, and dozens of roads and bridges simply washed away.

Helene also decimated more than two dozen water utilities. For weeks after the storm, people had to boil anything that wasn’t poured from a bottle, and many of them drew from creeks and ponds just to flush their toilets. Folks in Asheville, where taps ran dry for three weeks, were told just this week that their water is safe to drink without boiling it first, but thousands of people served by 16 utilities still deal with sketchy water, low pressure, and other frustrations. In an effort to make their lives a little easier, officials dipped into a $273 million relief package to dot this end of North Carolina with 650 portable toilets and 15 “community care stations” with showers and washing machines.

Asheville was lucky enough to have upgraded its reservoir last year, something that prevented even worse flooding and allowed the region’s largest city and the communities that rely upon it for water to recover sooner than they otherwise might have. But for towns like Spruce Pine, the financial and engineering challenges of repairing their water systems are as formidable as the hurricane that broke them.

The water that flows into the North Fork Reservoir, which serves Asheville and the towns of Black Mountain and Swannanoa, always ran clear and clean from its headwaters high in Pisgah National Forest. But mud and debris have turned it murky brown and damaged much of the equipment needed to pump it. Crews have worked around the clock to set things right, reconnecting pipelines in record time and drawing muck from the lake.

Repairing municipal water systems leveled by a storm that washed away distribution lines, overwhelmed intakes, and inundated treatment plants is no easy feat. The challenge is acute in mountain communities, where geography is a hassle. Much of the infrastructure required to draw, treat, and distribute water often sits alongside reservoirs, placing them squarely in a floodplain when the torrent arrives and increasing the likelihood of damage. Reaching anything needing attention can take days or even weeks because the lines that carry water to customers meander through valleys, over ridgelines, and along roadways, many of which remain impassable. Spruce Pine Water & Sewer has restored service to 90 percent of its 2,000 or so customers, but can’t do much for the rest of them until the roads are fixed.

The sewer system remains a mess too. Town manager Darlene Butler has asked residents to conserve water as she works with county officials and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to erect a temporary treatment facility. The equipment is only now arriving and will, at best, be a Band-Aid for a multi-year fix. “We had a lot of damage there, so we’re trying to encourage people not to use a lot of water and put it into our sewer system,” she said.

A lot of these utilities struggled even before Helene. In many Appalachian towns, the companies that once paid to maintain water and sewer systems have shut down or moved on, and shrinking populations generate less revenue to keep things shiny and new. This is endemic throughout Appalachia. Residents in McDowell County, West Virginia — where one-third of families live in poverty — have for example given up on the often discolored water that flows from their taps and buy it by the case instead. Pipes in Martin County, Kentucky lose about 64 percent of what flows through them, a problem that started 24 years ago when a toxic coal slurry spill damaged them. The burden of these failures falls on customers who must adapt to the situation even as their rates climb. (Rates in Martin County, North Carolina, to offer one example, are among the nation’s highest.)

Yet other systems, particularly those in tourist towns, struggle to keep up with rapidly growing populations. The challenges are compounded by the difficulty of running new lines in the mountains and maintaining the complex pumps needed to maintain pressure over ridgelines. “This is a really, really great place to live,” said Clay Chandler, Asheville’s water resources information officer. “It’s beautiful. The people are amazing. But, man, it makes it hard to operate a water system.”

Spruce Pine’s system is so old that Butler has no idea when its pipes were laid, though she guesses it was 60 years ago. The pump station, recently upgraded with money from the American Rescue Plan, was built in 1967. It has seen overhauls as things broke, but rural utilities rarely make wholesale improvements because they are expensive and disruptive. “I think, like most small towns, we’ve struggled for the funds to be proactive instead of reactive,” Butler said.

Even as communities deal with the aftermath of so much deferred maintenance, others are facing the inescapable fact that rebuilding on a floodplain may no longer make sense. Spruce Pine is banking on hazard mitigation funding from FEMA and help from federal officials to move its wastewater treatment plant to higher ground.

The work needed to fully, and permanently, restore water and sewer service in these communities will by most estimates take two to four years and cost many millions of dollars. Meanwhile, crews continue playing whack-a-mole as aging lines break. Another one gave way in rural Yancey County last week, sending a geyser dozens of feet into the air. 

About 2,000 people live in Spruce Pine, a busy place with water-intensive businesses that have been impacted by the disruption. There’s the mine that produces some of the purest quartz in the world and sent heavy equipment to help restore service. There are the restaurants and kitschy attractions that drive a burgeoning tourism industry. And then there are the two state prisons, each of which holds about 800 people (who were relocated after spending a week in flooded cells) and, like prisons everywhere, burden the local water and sewer systems.

The ongoing crisis also has made providing basic services a challenge. Blue Ridge Regional Hospital, which serves three counties, has long had a standby power supply but scrambled to cope with losing water. Trucks haul in what’s needed, and enormous bladders collect what’s been used. “We had backup generators to supply the hospital in case of an emergency,” said Alex Glover, chair of the hospital’s board of directors. “But we never dreamed we would lose water and sewage capabilities, and we lost them all at once.”

With water in short supply, the volunteer fire department banned burning the yard waste, brush, and other debris people have been clearing for weeks. “If we had a big fire and we needed to take several thousand gallons or more out of the system, we don’t really know for sure how long that supply would hold up,” said firefighter Chris Westveer.

The department has experienced some close calls. Westveer recalled one frightening night when wiring in a damaged home sparked a fire. The road had been washed away, forcing crews to approach on an all-terrain vehicle. With no water on tap, they drew what they needed from a river and hoped the wind wouldn’t spread the flames beyond their ability to fight them.

Such strains on public services, already scarce throughout mountain communities, compound the stress felt by those who have gone nearly two months without reliable water. People in Banner Elk, a community of 1,000 or so that had to rebuild a road before it could repair water and sewer lines, couldn’t flush their toilets for a month. County officials worried that the raw sewage would flow into the Elk River. Meredith Olan, director of the Banner House history museum, has been hauling water from the creek and boiling it just to do the dishes. “I’m very adept at carrying buckets now,” she said ruefully. Anyone wanting to take a shower had to rely upon the goodwill of friends with wells to draw from. But even that was no guarantee. Some were inundated with floodwaters and might have been contaminated with E. coli and other pathogens, and the electric pumps that pull water from the depths aren’t any good when the power is out. 

Even as these communities work nonstop to restore service, local and state officials are looking ahead to the next big storm. Members of the state Water Infrastructure Authority, a body tasked with financial planning for the state’s water and sewer utilities, gathered last month to ponder updates to North Carolina’s water infrastructure master plan. The document, created in 2017, explored ways of ensuring the financial stability of water utilities. Members of the panel, which includes several utility directors, a water engineer, and the head of the state Division of Water Infrastructure, acknowledged that local officials often have little idea how water and wastewater work and need help navigating the aftermath of a disaster and applying for grants to recover from it. 

Experts on the subject said consolidating the region’s patchwork of small systems may be the key to rebuilding and maintaining them. Some are doing just that. Four counties in southwestern Virginia are working together to install dozens of miles of water lines. Such efforts are easier among towns that are close together, like Mars Hill and Weaverville. These small towns, which are rapidly becoming suburbs of Asheville, have linked their water systems so they can ensure there’s enough to supply new housing. That connection allowed Weaverville to quickly buy and move water when the flood knocked out its municipal system. A similar arrangement proposed for nearby Marshall would cost about $15 million.

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Teamwork can provide a backup supply of water, reduce maintenance costs, and allow small utilities to share these essential resources and collaborate on, rather than compete for, grant applications. Such efforts will grow increasingly important as development and a warming world further burden these systems. “I think the fiefdom of water supply has to change for everyone to thrive in an era of climate catastrophe,” said Will Harlan, the Southeast director of the Center for Biological Diversity and a resident of Barnardsville, another community not far from Asheville.

Even if a physical collaboration isn’t possible, an organizational one might be. “If you’ve got three tiny towns and nobody can afford to hire a public works or public utilities director, the three of y’all go in together and hire a qualified utilities director,” one member of the master plan committee said during a public conference call. 

Barring any changes, the region is at risk of simply rebuilding what it has, only to watch it all wash away in the next big flood, said Francis de los Reyes. He is an engineering professor at North Carolina State University who focuses on sanitation systems. He’d like to see communities move their water infrastructure to higher ground, as Spruce Pine is doing, and relocate flood-prone neighborhoods, as is happening in eastern Kentucky. “Your choices are mitigation, adaptation, or staying in fight-or-flight,” de los Reyes said. 

But it takes more than a collaborative spirit and skilled leadership to repair a water system and harden it against future disasters. It requires communities to pool resources or seek federal support because they do not have the millions of dollars that work requires. Even before Helene struck, the bipartisan infrastructure law set aside $603 million to help North Carolina replace old pipes and other hardware. The fate of that money remains in question, however, because President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to undo much of the Biden administration’s climate work.

Back at Spruce Pine Montessori School, Jennifer Rambo is trying not to let uncertainty about the future get to her. It’s hard enough dealing with the present. Beyond the weeks without potable water, she is grappling with spotty internet access and electricity, and an inescapable sense of loss. In the days after Helene, she spent much of her time trying to determine if people were still alive. Her voice wavered as she said more or less the same words that so many in her community, and others like it, have echoed over the past two months: “Nobody was prepared.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rural water utilities in North Carolina are still reeling from Helene on Nov 22, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Katie Myers.

Sitting on the roof of the barn as visitors enter the property is a 23kW array of solar panels that power the farm’s operations. While solar originally was low on Schultz’s investment priority list, it became financially feasible once he took advantage of grants from the USDA’s Rural Energy for America, or REAP, program. This federal initiative provides grants and loans for projects like his. REAP funded about 40% of the two solar installations that now provide most of Stoney Acres Farms’ power. 

The panels cut his monthly power bill from $800 to $200 or less per month, Schultz says. He’s surprised solar companies aren’t getting the word out better, but he wants fellow rural business and farm owners to know about the grants. “Even if you don’t care about your carbon footprint, it’s an easy investment,” Schultz said. “My initial cost has already been repaid and then some because of the REAP grants. It’s something that gives back.”

Harvesting energy savings in rural communities

REAP is a federally funded program that provides grants and loans to help rural businesses put in a wide variety of clean and energy-efficient technologies. The program partially funds projects that can range from solar panels and battery storage to efficient greenhouse HVAC systems and produce refrigerators.

REAP was initially funded through the Farm Bill, which allocated $50 million per year to support renewable energy and efficiency projects for small farms and rural businesses. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 quadrupled that amount, adding $2 billion over 10 years. Farmers and rural small business owners can now apply for grants of up to $500,000 for energy efficiency projects and to $1 million for renewable energy systems.

The REAP grants can break down financial barriers to renewable energy, said Emma Searson, a policy & advocacy campaigner with Solar United Neighbors (SUN), a national nonprofit dedicated to helping people access solar. SUN provides guidance and support to farmers and rural small business owners applying for REAP funding. “With that funding, those projects suddenly make more sense for a small farmer or rural business owner,” Searson said. “And it’s a powerful equity tool. Rural areas often have limited access to clean, affordable energy technologies, but the REAP program gives extra weight to applications from underserved rural communities.” 

Beyond the obvious financial advantages, solar projects can come with a host of other unplanned benefits, Searson said. Energy security and resilience are crucial for farmers, who risk major losses if the power fails during weather events. Many in rural areas also value independence — producing energy on-site aligns with their values of self-reliance. It also helps demonstrate environmental stewardship to customers.

Generating energy can also promote financial stability, which can allow businesses to invest back in their business. In some cases, it can even create extra income by allowing them to sell power back to the grid. When solar-hosting businesses produce more energy than they need, the excess electricity is sent back into the power grid for use by others, and the businesses can credit on their utility bill for the energy they contributed.

For Schultz, while the cost savings of solar was his initial motivator, he’s also noted other unexpected perks. “People are impressed when they see our solar panels — they’re part of our identity,” he said. “Our solar installation validates Stoney Acres as a sustainable family farm.”

Avoiding outages, selling energy back 

Near Sedona, Arizona, vintner and winery owner Eric Glomski creates wines that reflect the Verde Valley at Page Springs Cellars. He’s also proud that the winery is now completely powered by renewable energy, thanks to solar arrays and Tesla commercial battery storage funded by REAP grants. The grants covered roughly 25% of the system’s cost, and Glomski said that after just six years, the winery has already recouped the investment.

Energy independence was a huge motivator for the transition to solar. “The weekends are our biggest revenue generators at the winery,” Glomski said. “If we lose power and need to close for a day during the high season, the business loses almost $15,000.” He also appreciates the energy flexibility — the batteries allow him to store energy to use during peak hours when rates are high, and the winery often sells energy back to the grid.

The most tangible benefits of the solar implementation were on the winery’s bottom line, Glomski said. But it’s also had intangible benefits for the vineyard’s revenues and reputation. “People want to put their dollars with businesses that take sustainability seriously,” he said. “And we’ve gotten so much visibility from our focus on renewable energy — we’ve had newspaper and magazine features, even won awards.”

Other unexpected benefits have included the increased sense of pride that employees take in the business. Glomski highlights the story of an employee who educated herself about the winery’s sustainability practices and now gives eco-tours of the winery to visitors. “The solar panels were a big part of that,” he said.

As Page Springs Winery enjoys the benefits of the REAP program, Glomski hopes that other farmers in his region will follow suit. “I know farmers who spend $30,000 [or] $40,000 a year on pumping water,” he said. “If they could use the REAP program to fund solar as their energy source, it would make a big difference in their bottom line.”

Even though REAP has become more popular and grants more competitive, Searson still emphasizes that the program is a critical resource. “REAP is a remarkable and impactful opportunity for farmers and rural small businesses,” she said. “It can make solar or other energy efficiency projects financially attainable. These technologies can make a huge difference for your business or farm in the long term.”

Solar United Neighbors (SUN) has developed a 10-week program that helps walk farmers and rural small business owners through the REAP application process. Those interested in assistance can join online: Ready, Set, Solar!

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline For farms and rural businesses, a fresh and funded harvest includes the sun on Nov 12, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Grist Creative.

The salvage yard, which buys used vehicles and farm machinery in this rural area to sell for parts, has been in business for nearly 70 years. For most of those years, the dam — less than a half-mile up the road — has protected its yard of hundreds of old cars and broken-down equipment from frequent and sometimes severe flooding in the area.

The dam “was put in place for a reason,” said owner Greg Sheldon.

But it might soon go away. 

Maple Dale is one of thousands of dams constructed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, beginning in the mid-20th century, for the purposes of flood control. 

In 2018, five similar dams in the region failed during a massive rainstorm that caused property damage in the tens of millions of dollars. A study determined that several other dams in the watersheds hit hardest by the flood, including Maple Dale, were also vulnerable to failure but would be too expensive to replace. 

As a result, local officials are voting on whether to dismantle the dams by cutting large notches in them, allowing the water to flow again, in a process called decommissioning. Experts say it could be the most dams ever decommissioned in a single county in the U.S. 

And it could be a harbinger for other communities.

Although the county may be the first to take on a project of this size, it’s unlikely to be the last. Dams across the country are aging, and also facing pressures from urban sprawl and intensifying floods wrought by climate change. The price tag to fix what’s broken, though, is estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars, meaning dam owners could face hard questions about what to do with them. 

In Viroqua, it’s also leaving the people who own property below the dams uneasy about what comes next — including Sheldon.

“To come along and just rip a big hole out and let the water run is a mistake,” he said.

Removal plan controversial

The southwest Wisconsin dams are among nearly 12,000 that have been built under the USDA’s Watershed Programs. Generally smaller and set in rural agricultural areas, they’re mostly clustered from the center of the country eastward. Oklahoma has the most, followed by Texas, Iowa, and Missouri. 

The idea for the watershed program dams arose during the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Because there was little vegetation left on the landscape to soak up rain when it fell, there were several severe floods during that time, prompting federal agencies to look for a way to control the water. 

To get the dams built, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS, entered into a contract with a local sponsor, such as a county. NRCS covered all the construction costs and helped the sponsor with inspections and repairs. In return, the sponsor maintained the dam for a certain number of years — under most contracts, 50 — to ensure taxpayers got their money’s worth out of the project. 

Since many of the dams were built in the 1960s and 1970s, said Steve Becker, Wisconsin’s state conservation engineer for NRCS, their contracts are now up. 

“We pretty much told the counties, ‘You have full autonomy to do whatever you want with those dams,” Becker said. “You can maintain, you can rehab, you can repair. It doesn’t really matter. We’re out.” 

When the Wisconsin dams failed, however, local officials enlisted the help of NRCS to figure out what to do. The agency launched a study of all the dams in the watersheds and found that, while they’d controlled flooding over the last few decades, they fared much worse under future modeling because of their age and projected increases in heavy rainfall. Because the cost to replace them was too steep, NRCS recommended taking them out of service, on the federal government’s dime. 

In Vernon County, home to the majority of the dams examined in the study, that plan has been controversial. 

Garrick Olerud is treasurer of the Snowflake Ski Club in Westby, which is below three of the dams that are set to be dismantled. The club has had to spend “a lot” of money over the past decade fixing flood damage to the ski jump and the golf course on the property, Olerud said — and that’s with the protection of the dams. 

“When you remove those dams, I guess I have big, big concerns about the long-term effects it’ll have,” he said. “I’m not an expert, but I don’t believe that the course or the ski jump will continue to … have the financial means to build back after stuff gets washed away.” 

To others, leaving the dams in place risks a bigger catastrophe if more of them fail during a storm.

“When [the dams] work, they work, but when they go out, it’s 10 times worse than a regular flood,” Frank Easterday, a member of the Vernon County board, said during an August 15 meeting. 

At the meeting, the board voted to accept federal funding from NRCS so the agency can move forward with decommissioning. Nearby La Crosse and Monroe counties, which have a handful of such dams between them, have followed suit. 

Aging dams, climate threats make for ‘perfect storm’ 

Threats to America’s dam infrastructure were thrust into the spotlight in June when the Rapidan dam in southern Minnesota partially failed, pushed to its limit by days of historic flooding across the upper Midwest. 

In the American Society of Civil Engineers’ latest Infrastructure Report Card, released in 2021, the group gave the nations’ more than 91,000 dams a “D.” That’s largely because of their age — the average age of a dam in the U.S. is over 60 years old, said Del Shannon, the lead author of that section of the report card. 

As residential development has sprawled nationally, some dams that once posed little risk to human life if they failed are now a bigger threat. 

On top of that, climate change is leaving question marks about how dams will perform under new weather conditions. Precipitation, for example, increased 5 percent to 15 percent across the Midwest between 1992 to 2021, compared with the 1901-1960 average. That’s largely driven by intensifying rainfalls.  

To date, almost 6,600 of the watershed program dams will have completed their contracts, according to an NRCS spokesperson. In the next five years, that number will rise to 7,383. That means many more places like Vernon County will have decisions to make about how — and whether — to keep them up. 

In 2015, now-retired NRCS watershed program engineer Larry Caldwell warned in a memo that a “perfect storm” of problems with watershed dams could put people and property at risk. He outlined seven such problems: these dams are everywhere across the nation; downstream landscapes have filled in since they were constructed; they’re getting old; climate change is bringing more extreme weather; limited funds for repairs; loss of institutional knowledge about the dams; and the fact that the failure of smaller dams can — and have — killed people. 

“Any one condition is cause for concern. The presence of two or three would be cause for alarm,” Caldwell wrote. “But all seven are occurring simultaneously, which will eventually create a crisis for many communities.” 

Properly maintained dams can continue doing their job “well beyond” their contracts, the NRCS spokesperson said. Still, understanding the proper path forward for an individual dam can be challenging because all dams are unique, Shannon said. 

What’s more, there’s not a good understanding of how long these kinds of dams can function, a gap Shannon called “astonishing and embarrassing.” He’ll take part in a forthcoming study that seeks to give dam owners broad information about when dam parts start to show wear — like crumbling concrete spillways or corroded metal gates — and when to think about repairing, replacing or charting another course. 

High price tag for dam rehab means other solutions may be necessary 

Another hurdle in the quest for better dam infrastructure: cost. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials, which works to improve dam safety through professional development and lobbying, estimates the cost to fix nonfederal dams, which make up the vast majority of the nation’s dams, at $157.5 billion. 

The bipartisan infrastructure law, passed in 2021, provided somewhat of a shot in the arm: $3 billion was earmarked for dam safety, including $118 million for the rehabilitation of the USDA watershed program dams. An NRCS spokesperson said that money paid for 118 dam projects across the nation, many clustered in the southern and eastern U.S.

Shannon said he views it as a downpayment, but more funding is obviously needed. The southwest Wisconsin dams, for example, would cost a few million dollars apiece to replace, Becker estimated — racking up close to $100 million just for one small region. 

“What can we afford to do? We can afford to notch them out,” Becker said. “If some big benefactor came in and said, ‘23 dams times $3.5 million? We can help pay for that,’ we’d reevaluate.” 

Although recent federal funding will move the needle, looking at the total cost can be depressing, said Lori Spragens, executive director of the Association of State Dam Safety Officials — particularly when remembering that dams are aging every day. She called it a “one step forward, two steps back” situation, and said there’s an urgent need to make progress. 

“I think we are going to see more dams under stress, or even failing,” Spragens said. “It’s not really fun to look at in the future.” 

Amid these challenges, there’s growing interest in natural solutions to reduce the impact of floodwaters in place of built infrastructure. Moving away from areas that flood often and using farming practices that help the land hold on to water, instead of allowing it to run downstream, could help. 

The community in Vernon County recognizes that. 

“With or without the dams, flooding is going to be a huge challenge in this community,” county conservationist Ben Wojahn told the board during the Aug. 15 meeting. “Decommissioning these dams is not the end … keeping the dams would not be the end.” 

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The fate of thousands of U.S. dams hangs in the balance, leaving rural communities with hard choices on Oct 14, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Madeline Heim, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

It has been difficult for residents to adapt to the warming climate and new seasonal swings. Many don’t have air conditioning and are unprepared for the new pattern of daytime temperatures hovering in the 90s — for days or even weeks on end. Dehydration, heat exhaustion, heatstroke, and abnormalities in heart rate and blood pressure are among the many health complications that can develop from excessive exposure to high temperatures.

It can happen anywhere and to anyone, said Missoula firefighter Andrew Drobeck. He remembers a recent 911 call. The temperature that day had risen to over 90 degrees and a worker at a local dollar store had fainted. “She’s sensitive to the heat. Their AC wasn’t working super good,” Drobeck said. “I guess they only get a 15-minute break.”

Drobeck said many of the heat calls his department receives are from seniors who struggle to stay cool inside their older homes. Montana’s population is among the oldest in the country. About 1 in 4 residents are over 60. Those over 65 are especially vulnerable to heat-related illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As people age, their bodies don’t acclimate to heat as well as they did when they were younger, including not producing as much sweat.

In July, a heat dome that settled over much of the western U.S. baked the region and shattered two types of temperature records: daily highs, and number of consecutive days over 90 degrees. Although the Northwest, including western Montana, is typically cooler, the region experienced record-breaking heat this summer.

Emergency responders like Drobeck have noticed. Drobeck says 911 calls during heat waves have ticked up over the last few summers. But Missoula County officials wanted to know more: They wanted better data on the residents who were calling and the communities that had been hardest hit by the heat. So the county teamed up with researchers at the University of Montana to comb through the data and create a map of 911 calls during heat waves.

The team paired call data from 2020 with census data to see who lived in the areas generating high rates of emergency calls when it was hot. The analysis found that for every 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degree Fahrenheit) increase in the average daily temperature, 911 calls increased by 1 percent, according to researcher Christina Barsky, who co-authored the study.

Though that may sound like a small increase, Barsky explained that a 5-degree jump in the daily average temperature can prompt hundreds of additional calls to 911 over the course of a month. Those call loads can be taxing on ambulance crews and local hospitals.

The Missoula study also found that some of the highest rates of emergency calls during extreme heat events came from rural areas, outside Missoula’s urban core. That shows that rural communities are struggling with heat, even if they get less media attention, Barsky said. “What about those people, right? What about those places that are experiencing heat at a rate that we’ve never been prepared for?” she said.

Barsky’s work showed that communities with more residents over 65 tend to generate more 911 calls during heat waves. That could be one reason so many 911 calls are coming from rural residents in Missoula County: Barsky said people living in Montana’s countryside and its small towns tend to be older and more vulnerable to serious heat-related illness.

And aging in rural communities can pose extra problems during heat waves. Even if it cools off at night, an older person living without air conditioning might not be able to cope with hours of high temperatures inside their home during the day. It’s not uncommon for rural residents to have to drive an hour or more to reach a library that might have air conditioning, a community center with a cooling-off room, or medical care. Such isolation and scattered resources are not unique to Montana. “I grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,” Barsky said. “There are no air-conditioned spaces in at least 50 miles. The hospital is 100 miles away.”

Heat research like the Missoula study has focused mostly on large cities, which are often hotter than outlying areas, due to the “heat island” effect. This phenomenon explains why cities tend to get hotter during the day and cool off less at night: It’s because pavement, buildings, and other structures absorb and retain heat. Urban residents may experience higher temperatures during the day and get less relief at night.

By contrast, researchers are only just beginning to investigate and understand the impacts of heat waves in rural areas. The impacts of extreme heat on rural communities have largely been ignored, said Elizabeth Doran, an environmental engineering professor at the University of Vermont. Doran is leading an ongoing study in Vermont that is revealing that towns as small as 5,000 people can stay hotter at night than surrounding rural areas due to heat radiating off hot pavement. “If we as a society are only focused on large urban centers, we’re missing a huge portion of the population and our strategies are going to be limiting in how effective they can be,” Doran said.

Brock Slabach, with the National Rural Health Association, agrees that rural residents desperately need help adapting to extreme heat. They need support installing air conditioning or getting to air-conditioned places to cool off during the day. Many rural residents have mobility issues or don’t drive much due to age or disability. And because they often have to travel farther to access health care services, extra delays in care during a heat-related emergency could lead to more severe health outcomes. “It’s not unreasonable at all to suggest that people will be harmed from not having access to those kinds of services,” he said.

Helping rural populations adapt will be a challenge. People in rural places need help where they live, inside their homes, said Adriane Beck, director of Missoula County’s Office of Emergency Management. Starting a cooling center in a small community may help people living in town, but it’s unrealistic to expect people to drive an hour or more to cool off. Beck said the Missoula County Disaster and Emergency Services Department plans to use data from the 911 study to better understand why people are calling in the first place.

In the coming years, the department plans to talk directly with people living in rural communities about what they need to adapt to rising temperatures. “It might be as simple as knocking on their door and saying, ‘Would you benefit from an air conditioner? How can we connect you with resources to make that happen?’” Beck said.

But that won’t be possible for every rural household because there simply isn’t enough money at the county and state level to pay for that many air-conditioning units, Missoula County officials said. That’s why the county wants to plan ahead for heat waves and have specific protocols for contacting and assisting vulnerable rural residents.

“Ideally, we’d be in a situation where maybe we have community paramedics that can be deployed into those areas when we know that these events are going to happen so they can check on them and avoid that hospital admission,” Beck explained. She added that preventing heat-related hospitalizations among rural residents can ultimately save lives.

This article is from a partnership that includes MTPR, NPR, and KFF Health News, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Montana, 911 calls reveal impact of heat waves on rural seniors on Sep 21, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Aaron Bolton, MTPR.

“Get up,” she told him. “There’s a flood outside.” 

It was 8 a.m. on a Thursday in late July, two years ago in rural Pike County, Kentucky, and rain had been pouring for days. Overnight, it got heavier. Homes and vehicles were being swept down the narrow valleys of Eastern Kentucky’s mountainous terrain.

Dozens of people died after more than a foot of rain fell from July 26 through July 30, 2022, flooding 13 rural counties in Eastern Kentucky. Yet as these communities attempt to rebuild, they’re being overlooked for federal spending that’s protecting wealthier and more urbanized Americans from such weather disasters.

Wesley, Alexis, their two daughters and Alexis’ sister evacuated, hiking the half-mile to Alexis’ mother’s house via the mountains behind their own home to avoid flooded roads. They’ve been living there ever since.  

Kentucky is a regular victim of flooding. During the past century, more than 100 people have died in storms across the state, including at least 44 two summers ago. Heat-trapping pollution is driving up rainfall rates and flood risks.

Thousands of survivors were forced to move out of damaged homes, including Wesley and his family. Their house, which Wesley’s grandfather built in the 1970s, is unlivable. Insulation peels from the ceiling and the floors bubble with water damage. Finding contractors to fix the house has been difficult because thousands of other flooded properties are also being repaired or replaced. 

Their furniture and appliances were destroyed, and Wesley estimates replacing them would cost around $20,000. The family was denied FEMA disaster assistance so they’ve had to foot these costs themselves. “We just need a little help from our government,” he said.

Despite histories of flooding, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) classifies Pike County and the 12 other counties that flooded two years ago as facing “low” risks in the event of a natural disaster like a flood. That’s largely because they have less to lose —financially — compared to more urbanized areas. 

Critics of FEMA’s risk-determination tool, called the National Risk Index, say it doesn’t include enough information about rural communities, especially when it comes to flooding, leading it to understate hazards.

That suggests that as the federal government cranks up spending on infrastructure, including the allocation of more than $1 billion to help reduce future flood threats, families in East Kentucky and other rural regions are at risk of missing out on projects that could help them prepare better for the next disaster. 

What is the National Risk Index?

FEMA developed its National Risk Index to help local and state officials and residents plan for emergencies through an online tool. The agency sourced historic rainfall and other data to characterize these risks, allowing it to paint a national picture of threats from local disasters, findings that influence its spending decisions.

FEMA began developing the risk index in 2016, though initial work dates to 2008. The first iteration of the risk index was released in October 2020, and the data has been updated twice since then, most recently in March 2023.

Work to update how the risk index handles inland flooding is expected early next year. In a press release touting new requirements that forced the coming update, the Biden administration said that in “recent years, communities have seen repeated flooding that threatens both lives and property” but that the agency’s approaches to measuring risks based on historical data “have become outdated.” 

The agency is also working on a “climate-informed” risk index looking at future hazards but, so far, inland flooding is not on the list of disasters planned to be included. 

FEMA’s national and regional press offices declined to be interviewed or answer questions for this story.

“There’s a bias against, I think, rural communities, especially in the flood dataset,” said Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, a nonprofit that certifies floodplain managers and educates policymakers about flood loss. He said this bias could profoundly confuse or affect emergency managers in those areas.

“It’s giving false results,” Berginnis said. “I think we’ve got to be very thoughtful and very careful on how we use [the risk index] for the hazard of flood in particular.” 

The building of homes and communities in vulnerable locations and the effects of heat-trapping pollution are converging to escalate the frequency of weather disasters across the U.S. One of the effects of climate change is an intensification in the amount of rainfall that can fall every hour. A federal report on the latest climate science showed the rainiest days across the Southeast are dumping more than a third more water on average now than was the case in the late 1950s. Ongoing emissions and warming threaten to continue to boost rainfall rates.

“If it’s gone up that much already, we might be wise to be concerned,” said Scott Denning, an atmospheric sciences professor at Colorado State University who studies carbon dioxide, water, and energy cycles. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

That rain often falls on ground where coal mining excavations removed mountaintops. Researchers overlaid data regarding fatalities from the floods with maps of mountaintop removal mining and found that many of the deaths were downstream from or adjacent to such sites. 

Neglecting rural Americans

Todd DePriest doesn’t “believe in Facebook,” but uses his mother’s account to surf the website’s digital marketplace. That’s what he was doing two summers ago when he saw alerts about severe floods in Letcher County, Kentucky, where he serves as the mayor of Jenkins, population 1,800. 

Public service announcements warning people to “turn around, don’t drown” during floods were circulating on his mother’s feed. DePriest got up from his computer to look out the window at the torrential rain and realized the threat his own town was about to face. 

DePriest jumped in his Jeep to check on the bridge at the lower end of Jenkins. When he got there, the road across the bridge had already flooded. 

“I started calling people I knew down there and said, ‘Hey, the water’s up and if you want to get out of here, we’re going to have to do something pretty quick,’” DePriest said. 

His next calls were to the fire department to prepare them for the emergencies to which they were likely to respond, then to city workers to get essential maintenance vehicles like garbage trucks to higher ground. 

Letcher County was one of the hardest hit of the 13 counties declared federal disaster areas by FEMA. Five of those killed across the region were in Letcher County. 

Two years since the floods, the region is still rebuilding. “They (FEMA) were telling us it was going to take four or five, six years to recover and get through this,” DePriest said. “And I thought, well, there’s no way it’s going to take that long.”

Now, DePriest hopes it only takes five years. 

“All the processes and dealing with FEMA – and I think they’re fair in what they do – but it’s just a process,” DePriest said. 

The National Risk Index multiplies a community’s expected annual loss in dollars by their risk factor. Like most of the east Kentucky counties that flooded two summers ago, Letcher County’s risk level is scored “very low” by the risk index. 

That’s because it includes annual asset loss in its equations. 

Rural counties like Letcher, where the average home costs about $75,000 and median household income is half the national average, score lower on the risk scale because there are fewer dollars to lose when disaster strikes. The area’s flood hazard threat is deemed relatively high but the potential consequences in financial losses are lower compared with denser areas. 

The urban-rural disparity can be examined by comparing how the National Risk Index judges Jackson, Kentucky, a small city about 80 miles southeast of Lexington, with Jackson, Mississippi, the Magnolia State’s populous capital. 

Both cities saw disastrous flooding during the summer of 2022. Unlike its namesake in Kentucky, Jackson, Mississippians suffered no flood deaths, though financial damage was far worse — an estimated $1 billion. 

Hinds County – home to Mississippi’s capital – is assigned a “relatively moderate” risk level. Its social vulnerability is categorized as very high, with community resiliency categorized as relatively high, meaning the community is expected to bounce back more effortlessly after disaster. River flooding is deemed the second greatest natural disaster risk, with annual losses estimated at about $15 million.

To compare, Breathitt County, where Jackson, Kentucky, is located, is given a “very low” risk level by the National Risk Index. Its social vulnerability is categorized as relatively high and community resiliency is categorized as very low, suggesting it would need more help after disasters. Although FEMA considers river flooding the greatest disaster risk to the community, its annual losses are rated at just $1.3 million.

This urban-rural difference matters because FEMA uses the National Risk Index to determine how much money communities should receive to better prepare for natural disasters. For example, it’s being used to make decisions about spending $1.2 trillion available to lessen future flood risks under the U.S. Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

The risk index is also used to determine which communities get money through FEMA’s Community Disaster Resilience Zones program, which designated 483 community census tracts as Community Disaster Resilience Zones last year. This means the communities inside those tracts can receive extra money for disaster planning. Of those census tracts, a third are federally classified as rural.

Disaster experts say relying solely on the risk index can disadvantage places that lack long-term weather records — which are often missing from rural communities. 

Weather stations can be sparse in treacherous landscapes. Rural areas are among the last to have their flood hazards mapped by FEMA, with the agency prioritizing higher-density regions. And National Weather Service offices tend to be located in more urban areas, according to Melanie Gall, co-director of the Center for Emergency Management Homeland Security at Arizona State University. 

“I think that we miss a lot,” she said.

Progress post-flood 

Immediately after the July 2022 floods, FEMA and Kentucky Emergency Management began temporarily providing trailers for hundreds of flood survivors. Both programs have since ended.

FEMA gave trailer occupants the option to purchase their units as permanent housing. The trailer cost was determined by a formula that factored the type of unit, its size, and how many months it had been occupied by the interested buyer.

In the middle of the most recent winter, 18 months after torrential rainfall on steep slopes left so many families homeless, federal trailers that hadn’t been paid for were hauled away.

Kentucky’s program offered more flexibility: While the program has ended, three families still live in state-funded campers, according to Julia Stanganelli, flood recovery coordinator for the Housing Development Alliance. The Eastern Kentucky-based affordable housing developer has led the efforts to rehab and rebuild houses lost in the flood using state disaster money. 

The three families are living in the campers while they wait for a new housing development to be built above the floodplain in Knott County, Kentucky, Stanganelli said. 

East Kentucky’s population was declining long before the floods. Shaping Our Appalachian Region, a nonprofit focused on population retention and growth, estimates Eastern Kentucky has lost nearly 55,000 residents since 2000. The floods accelerated the losses. 

During the 2022 floods, already sparse cell service went out entirely, and even the U.S. Weather Service’s on-duty warning meteorologist faced busy or disconnected phone lines, recalls Jane Marie Wix, a warning coordination meteorologist with the Weather Service. 

Wix said the creek near her house turned into a “river,” preventing her from reaching work. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so helpless before.” 

Locals are working to better prepare for the next disaster, with or without federal government help. 

Todd DePriest, the mayor of Jenkins, worked with the nonprofit law firm Appalachian Citizens Law Center to pay for four stream monitors that can trigger flood warnings. 

Wesley Bryant, the Pike County resident whose home flooded two years ago, said he’s called his state representatives “hundreds of times” to keep Eastern Kentucky’s disaster recovery top of mind. 

Bryant said he recently felt “pretty defeated” after receiving another notification about failing to qualify for federal assistance. But he said he won’t quit fighting. 

“This is my home, this is my commonwealth,” Wesley said. “I’m going to fight for it.”

Update:

Following the publication of this story, a FEMA spokesperson reached out to clarify that responses to emailed questions initially provided “on background” were available for publication.

Those statements included that, of the NRI’s benefits, “[h]aving a baseline knowledge of natural hazard risk is essential for preparing for, recovering from, mitigating, and ultimately reducing the impacts of these hazards on an individual to nationwide scale.”

Rural communities face “unique challenges” for data collection around natural hazards, given that these weather events are more likely to be reported from urban areas and along roads, the spokesperson added, and rural areas often face a “more substantial challenge” in the “lack of capacity in terms of staffing, expertise, and resources to collect and store the data.”

FEMA’s spokesperson reiterated that the agency is consistently soliciting and receiving input from experts on natural hazard risk assessment, and working with states, tribes, and territories to fill in current data gaps and implement other feedback. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The rural Americans too poor for federal flood protections on Aug 18, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Claire Carlson, The Daily Yonder.

This story describes an attempted murder in a domestic violence case.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with WPLN/Nashville Public Radio. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Before rural Scott County remade itself into a model for managing domestic violence, Jade Peters didn’t know where to turn for help. Her ex-boyfriend was stalking her and threatened to kill other men who talked to her.

She knew he had a gun, but so did many people in Scott County, and she didn’t think the justice system would take her seriously.

If you or someone you know needs help, here’s a guide on how to navigate Tennessee’s justice system for domestic violence victims.

One night in 2009, Peters was walking up her steps when she saw someone approaching. As he got closer, she realized it was her ex-boyfriend. She fumbled with her keys, trying to set off her car alarm.

He pulled his hand out of his pocket. A sudden bright light pierced the darkness — the flash of a gun firing.

The bullet tore through Peters’ mouth and throat, with fragments lodging in her spine. When she was able to drag herself into her house to call for help, she remembers avoiding her reflection in the mirror, not wanting to see what damage the bullet had done.

A few years ago, Scott County decided that the system that Peters and other domestic violence victims across the state contended with wasn’t good enough. Tennessee consistently has one of the highest rates of women killed by men, and most of those homicides are committed with a gun. Yet, over the years, the state has loosened its gun laws, making it easier for people to buy and carry firearms. While the state bars domestic abusers and people with felony convictions from having guns, WPLN and ProPublica found that those laws are rarely enforced.

Tucked into the Appalachian foothills along the Kentucky border, Scott County recognized that victims in rural areas face unique barriers. There are few resources, like domestic violence shelters. Law enforcement and the courts typically lack staff and training. And cultural attitudes about domestic violence and guns can make officers and judges less likely to believe women or more reluctant to take firearms away from abusers.

The county completely overhauled the way it handles domestic violence cases. It brought most of the agencies that deal with domestic violence into one building called the Family Justice Center. It then started one of the state’s only court programs solely dedicated to handling domestic violence cases.

And vitally, the county took steps to better ensure that people subject to domestic violence charges or protection orders don’t have guns.

Peters said that if the reforms had existed when she needed them, she would have known where to get help. “It would have made a difference,” she said.

Separating dangerous people from their guns is an issue that much of the country grapples with. But in Tennessee, “it’s even more inconsistent in these rural communities,” said Heather Herrmann, who oversees a statewide group that studies domestic violence homicides. She said in rural areas, judges are more likely to consider things like whether accused abusers hunt or have jobs that require guns.

In rural Lewis County in Middle Tennessee, for example, Judge Mike Hinson said protecting gun rights weighs heavily in his decisions. It can be hard to justify signing an order of protection — which can bar someone from coming near the victim, contacting them or having firearms — if a gun wasn’t involved in the domestic violence incident, he said.

“It’s those close cases where I try to balance a person’s rights — because they do have a Second Amendment right, and they do have a right to protect themselves, and they do have a right to get a job,” Hinson said. “That’s the tougher balance.”

It’s a balance he acknowledged he doesn’t always get right.

Even if a judge orders someone to give up their guns, there’s a glaring gap in Tennessee’s system. It’s one of about a dozen states that allow someone to give their gun to a third party like a friend or relative instead of a law enforcement agency or a licensed firearms dealer. And it doesn’t require that the person be identified to the court. In such cases, someone could say they gave up their guns but still have access to them, advocates for domestic violence victims say.

Scott County saw that gap and decided to change its firearms form, requiring abusers to name the person who is holding their guns and list their address. That person has to sign to verify they have the guns. Scott is the only one of Tennessee’s 95 counties that has done this, victim advocates say. They have asked the Tennessee Administrative Office of the Courts to change the form statewide, but the office says the legislature would have to do that.

It’s difficult to measure Scott County’s success because the numbers are so small. But data from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation shows that while domestic violence incidents have fallen slightly across the state, in Scott County, they’ve dropped by more than half, from nearly 250 in 2009 to an average of less than 100 in recent years. Victims are seeking protection orders from the courts more than they did before the reforms — a sign that there’s more trust in the system, victim advocates say. And far more requests are being approved.

No other rural county in Tennessee has yet followed Scott’s lead. And throughout the state, old attitudes prevail. On the other side of Nashville from Scott County is a region of rolling hills and cropland where guns and hunting are also a big part of life.

This area of Middle Tennessee is represented in Congress by Rep. Andy Ogles, a Republican who in 2021 sent out a Christmas card of his family holding guns. (Ogles didn’t respond to calls or emails from WPLN and ProPublica but has told reporters he didn’t regret the card.) Jason Aldean’s controversial music video, “Try That in a Small Town,” was filmed at a courthouse in the area and served as an anthem of old-school, small-town values that critics said was a racist rallying cry for vigilante justice and gun violence. (Aldean has defended the song and video.)

That culture permeates all the way up the justice system to judges, Herrmann said.

“When you have a really insular community, a really gun-focused community, and often a community that maybe has some misconceptions or stereotyping of what domestic violence is and what it means, then you have judges, not always, but often, who carry those same beliefs,” she said.

Judges in Tennessee have an incredible amount of power in how they run their courtrooms, which can greatly affect domestic violence cases. If a case lacks obvious physical signs of abuse, judges may fall back on their own notions about domestic violence, which research shows favors defendants.

Hinson said he sees himself as a representative for the culture of Lewis County. The county proudly boasts one of the largest collections of mounted trophy heads in North America. The old courthouse has a bullet hole from when a man going through a divorce brought a gun to confront his wife. The new courthouse is across the street from a store advertising that “we sell ammo.” With only about 12,500 residents, the county is the type of place where most people know each other, which can make domestic violence cases difficult.

Since 2014, many of those cases have gone before Hinson, a Lewis County native with icy blue eyes and gray hair.

Some folks around Lewis County call him “the people’s judge”: He often wears a quarter-zip sweater or a button-down shirt in court instead of a judicial robe. And he speaks plainly, like he’s talking to a friend he ran into at the store instead of someone in a jailhouse jumpsuit.

Hinson’s casual attitude and off-the-cuff remarks caused him to be suspended by the Administrative Office of the Courts’ Board of Judicial Conduct in 2021. In one case, in which he denied a woman an order of protection, the board said he made a “demeaning” comment, telling the couple that another judge would “wade through the bullshit” in their divorce. He later apologized for the remark.

Sometimes, Hinson said, he finds the law constricting and prefers to take his own approach. Once, that resulted in him dismissing hundreds of traffic tickets because he thought the community was being overly targeted. It made him popular among some residents — and less so with the Tennessee Highway Patrol.

“I don’t believe the law was made for us to worship,” Hinson said. “I believe the law is a tool.”

That applies to the domestic violence cases he sees in his courtroom, which, he said, often result from addiction. It’s a struggle Hinson himself relates to. He said he had a drinking problem and anger issues that ended his last marriage — something he shares with the men who appear before him in court.

“Some people just might need a little anger management,” Hinson said. “Some people, it was just a bad day and the only time it’s ever happened.”

Hinson also said he thinks some women overuse protection orders to gain the upper hand in a divorce case or custody battle.

“This is stuff that we hear from every corner of the state,” Herrmann said. “In these small towns in particular, people talk. They know what the judge has said to other people. They know how other people’s cases have gone.”

Some victims who went through Lewis County court said Hinson’s sympathy for the men made them feel dismissed or like they were the ones being reprimanded. Multiple victims asked not to be named because it’s a small community and they worried it could affect their cases. WPLN and ProPublica also sat in on Hinson’s court.

In February, Hinson admonished a woman who sought a protection order against her ex-boyfriend after he fired a gun into the ceiling during an argument. Instead of granting the order of protection, Hinson put the man under a no-contact order, which didn’t require him to give up his firearms.

He told the man he couldn’t reach out to the woman, but he also told the woman her ex-boyfriend wouldn’t be held responsible if she contacted him first and he replied. If that happens, Hinson said, “I’m gonna take his side.” And he urged her not to do what some women do, reaching out to their partners after leaving court to work out their problems. “We’re not going to be doing that,” he told her.

A month later, another woman in Hinson’s court seemed surprised by the way the judge spoke to her estranged husband after he assaulted her. Instead of chastising him about his behavior, Hinson appeared to try to motivate her husband by telling him his wife thought he was “a great guy.”

The woman, sitting in the courtroom that day, leaned over to a victim’s advocate and said, “I never said that.”

About 200 miles away, as the early morning fog cleared over the Scott County Justice Center in May, men slowly trickled into the courtroom under a sign in Greek that translates roughly to “a man’s character is his fate.” Their work boots thudded on the floor as they found seats on the wooden benches.

“All rise,” the bailiff said. “Domestic violence court is now in session.”

The men had already been convicted of domestic violence or were subject to protection orders. They were there so that Judge Scarlett Ellis could monitor whether they were keeping up with their probation appointments and other conditions like mental health and addiction treatment.

She looked up over her glasses with a kind smile at the group of men in front of her, the way a teacher might greet her class. Then one by one they stood in front of her. Ellis peppered them with questions: How has therapy been going? Have you avoided contact with your victim? What have you learned in batterers intervention class?

Ellis’ approach is encouraging but not lenient. When it’s clear that the men before her have made strides toward changing their behaviors, she doesn’t hesitate to tell them. One man stood at the podium, his hands clasped behind his back as he responded to her questions with, “Yes, ma’am,” and, “No, ma’am.” He had an interview later that day for a better-paying job, he told her.

“You’ve changed your life,” she told him. “I can see it. I really can.”

Ellis can use her discretion to have those who are doing well come to court less often. But if they’re not complying, she can also extend their probation or send them to jail.

Later in the day, when victims came to the domestic violence court for new cases to be heard, they were ushered by a court advocate into a back room to keep them separate from the men they say abused them. It’s one of many victim-centered changes the court has made. When their protection order hearing comes up, the victim stands at one podium, the offender at another, with the court advocate and a sheriff’s deputy between them.

Domestic violence court is held on a separate day from other cases to protect victims’ privacy.

“I was already embarrassed with what all had happened and being assaulted and then to have to be in a room with people who had done drugs and stole from others was just more embarrassing and belittling,” one person wrote in a community needs assessment that was conducted before the court was created.

Ultimately, a judge’s orders are only as strong as their enforcement, which Scott County has also tried to address. Like many rural counties, the Scott County Sheriff’s Department is small and understaffed. But it has a dedicated domestic violence officer to help victims.

“I’m their voice,” Deputy Danielle Gayheart said in a raspy twang. “They’ve done their side of it” by getting the order of protection, she said.

Gayheart has listened to jailhouse phone calls to see if an abuser was contacting a victim. She also checks social media. Once, a man posted a picture of himself hunting deer with a gun. When she sees those things, she’ll charge people with violating protection orders.

“When it comes to anything like that, I’m your girl,” she said.

One of the keys to holding defendants accountable in Scott County is its batterers intervention program. In other rural counties, attending one can mean a long drive: In Lewis County, for example, the closest one is over an hour away. Judges in those places often won’t list it as a court condition because it’s too hard to get to. But Scott County’s class is 10 minutes from the courthouse.

During one class, six men crowded around folding tables pushed together in a square. “We repeat what we don’t repair” was scrawled on a white board on the wall.

The facilitator led them through an exercise on how to recognize the signs of anger in their bodies and stop it before they take it out on someone else. Feeling hot-headed? Try sticking your head in the freezer. Feeling restless? Take a walk. Clenching your teeth? Chew a piece of gum. Many of the men are still in the relationships that put them in court, so creating these plans is urgent.

While the 26-week class is court-ordered, the men weren’t shy about participating.

“I’m not real good at showing my feelings,” one man said. “I never have been. You know, I was raised —”

“You don’t wear your feelings on your sleeve,” another chimed in from across the table.

“That’s right,” the first man said. “Growing up, you know, I was raised that you’re a man. You’re not supposed to show that because nobody gives a shit. You’re supposed to be stronger than that.”

Programs like this one have led to change, according to Peters. After the shooting, her ex-boyfriend pleaded guilty to attempted murder and was sentenced to prison. Peters recovered from her wounds and went back to school to become a lawyer, representing clients in Ellis’ domestic violence court.

She said men in Scott County know that when they’re brought to court on a domestic violence charge, there will be serious consequences.

“Men are somewhat afraid of that,” Peters said. “They’re very aware that you can be dispossessed of firearms for a year, that you can lose a lot of your rights, that you can be sentenced to programs and court appearances.”

She said that empowerment for victims and accountability for offenders has had an impact beyond just the court program — the system change has led to broader cultural change in Scott County.

“There’s still women who are in bad situations,” Peters said. “It’s just that now there’s more help for them.”

Mariam Elba contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

Three years ago, those fuels sparked a devastating fire. Neighbors helped Place and her husband, Ikaika, build a new house with rooftop solar and a battery. Even now, the buzz of constant, reliable power has yet to wear off. Beyond ensuring continuous internet access and a freezer for fish and venison — most residents depend upon subsistence fishing, hunting, and farming — their asthmatic son no longer relies on a generator to power his inhaler. “It’s unreal,” said Ikaika Place. “My wife has never had a house where she could just switch on the lights.”

It’s been a radical change. When it comes to electricity, residents of Molokaʻi get by with as little as possible. Consumption rates on this rural island are the lowest in the Hawaiian Archipelago, and energy costs are the most expensive in the state, which pays the nation’s highest price per watt. For the 7,300 or so residents, that often means forgoing the luxury of reliable power. In fact, the cost and challenges of accessing utilities prompt many to live off the grid altogether.

But locals have begun taking charge of their energy security. Four years ago, many of them came together to develop the Molokaʻi Community Energy Resilience Action Plan. The blueprint, backed by the state’s primary utility, maps the island’s transition from fossil fuels to renewables, largely through micro and nanogrids of photovoltaic arrays with batteries. Beyond that, Hoʻāhu Energy Cooperative Molokaʻi is establishing a subscription-based, collectively owned solar system, which eliminates the burden of buying expensive hardware and keeps funds invested locally. Two projects now underway are set to supply one-fifth of the island’s electricity. Implementing this plan, touted as a national model for community-driven renewable energy planning, falls to a growing number of locals who have become certified technicians.

These goals align with the state’s ambitious mandate to abandon fossil fuels, which provide 85 percent of Molokaʻi’s power, by 2045. Rather than let regulators and policymakers shape their future, island residents, known for their resilience, independence, and activism, have taken charge. Hoʻāhu — Hawaiian for “to capture” or “collect” — is “a community effort to achieve energy equity” says Lori Buchanan, a founding board member of the co-op and Native Hawaiian community leader.

Native Hawaiians have a long history of oppression and colonization. American and European  industrialists, along with missionary families, established the plantation economy in the early 1800s, displacing Indigenous peoples throughout the archipelago. With the backing of the U.S. government, they overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1893, depriving an internationally recognized nation of its right to political self-determination.

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But even within this context, Moloka`i has been uniquely exploited. Starting with early invasion by Native Hawaiians from larger islands, the Hawaiian legislature designated its northern reaches as a leper colony in 1865. The island has since been mined for sand to replenish Waikiki Beach and served as an open-field lab for GMO seed testing; 11 years ago, locals stopped a proposed state-backed wind farm intended to send power to O’ahu via undersea cables, but the experience left the community ever-wary of outside interests.

When it comes to resource decisions, “we’ve [long] been what was eaten for dinner” rather than having a seat at the table, Buchanan said. For Native Hawaiians, who comprise 65 percent of Molokaʻi’s population, in particular, energy sovereignty is central to self-determination. “We are taking control of our own destiny as a grassroots cooperative, as a people, as an island, to care for our own resources.”

As one of the world’s most remote places, Hawaiʻi relies heavily on imported oil and other fossil fuels, which results in exorbitant electricity rates, even as rising seas and intensifying storms place the archipelago on the frontlines of climate change. 

Accordingly, the state has fast-tracked its clean energy transition through comprehensive utility reforms, including a 2020 ban on coal and shuttering its last coal-fired plant. Solar panels dot the landscape and sprout from rooftops, bolstered by loans that help finance installations. Renewables account for one-third of the state’s energy mix, though that figure is higher in places like Kauaʻi, where nearly 60 percent of the power is green.

On Molokaʻi, about 500 rooftop arrays generate 15 percent of the island’s power, with the rest produced by Hawaiian Electric Company’s diesel-powered plant. These two sources supply energy to 93 percent of residents; the remainder live off-grid with diesel generators and propane. Despite the appeal of cheap, reliable power, adoption of solar is often hampered by the high cost of buying and installing the equipment, and by the fact it isn’t an option for renters or those who live in apartments, condos, and the like.

Community-based renewable energy, or CBRE, programs, are changing this dynamic. They offer monthly subscriptions, with no money down, to the power generated by solar arrays, bringing green energy to more people. Such programs “will be an integral part of Hawaiian Electric’s overall clean energy planning and efforts,” said Rebecca Dayhuff Matsushima, the utility’s vice president of renewable procurement.

The state Public Utilities Commission, or PUC, launched a statewide push for these community-based approaches in 2020. When it sought utility-scale proposals from Hawaiian Electric and solar companies, residents of Molokaʻi insisted that they have a voice in the process and an opportunity to shape their green energy future.

“We wanted to create a high-level roadmap reflective of local values and needs,” said Leilani Chow of Molokaʻi Clean Energy Hui, the volunteer organization that led the community planning process. (“Hui” is Hawaiian for “group.) Guided by local leaders and technical experts from the PUC and Hawaiian Electric, it spent two years facilitating nearly 3,000 community conversations, conducting hundreds of surveys, and organizing several focus groups.

The resulting Molokaʻi Community Energy Resilience Action Plan outlines a renewable power strategy that prioritizes equity, critical infrastructure, and disaster resilience. The state-approved plan identifies 10 projects, including residential and utility-scale micro- and nanogrids with enough battery capacity for water pumping stations, wastewater treatment plants and the hospital. It also calls for developing a local workforce to build and maintain these systems.

This endeavor helps counter Molokaʻi’s stubborn “anti-development” reputation, said Chow, who is Native Hawaiian. “Past [utility development] proposals were so misaligned with what we need,” she said. “This island isn’t opposed to progress, but we have extremely high standards of aloha ʻaina — how we care for the land and for each other.”

The Hoʻāhu cooperative emerged in 2020 alongside the community energy planning process, driven by a local desire to develop and own the resulting projects. The organization, led by a volunteer board, held nearly 40 public workshops to design the island’s first two community microgrids. Those projects, backed by Hawaiian Electric and a Department of Energy grant, include a 250-kilowatt solar array atop a carport at the Kualapuʻu recreation center and a 2.2-megawatt array in Pālāʻau, on seven acres the utility owns alongside its powerplant. Each features battery storage and will be integrated into the island’s grid; together, they’re expected to produce 20 percent of Molokaʻi’s power supply — enough for 1,500 households.

Both will be owned by the cooperative, which individuals, businesses, government entities and nonprofits are free to join. “Essentially, every subscriber will own a piece of the project and hold a stake in its success,” said Christopher O’Brien, Hoʻāhu’s executive director.

He estimates that subscriptions will shave at least 20 percent off residential electric bills, which currently average $450 a month. (About half of that amount pays a fee to operate and maintain the HECO grid, a surcharge that will remain.) However, the main benefit will be stable rates, O’Brien says, as power generation becomes independent of spiking oil prices.

The co-op is ensuring that the 100 or so off-grid homesteads benefit too. Building upon the prototype system powering the Place’s home, it plans to roll out 15 nanogrids in the next year through a $300,000 grant from the federal Energy Storage for Social Equity Initiative, with additional funding expected for 45 more. These standalone solar and battery systems will be collectively owned and maintained through subscriptions that O’Brien said are “significantly less” than the $500 the Place family spent each month on propane and diesel fuel.

To further ensure energy sovereignty, the co-op is cultivating a workforce to build and maintain its solar infrastructure. Hoʻāhu provides free in-person and online courses through the Energy Department and Arizona State University to train installers, technicians, and sales representatives, with an advanced microgrid course that includes a week at the university’s Laboratory for Energy And Power Solutions. More than 30 technicians have been certified in the past two years; graduates have come from fields like construction, retail, hospitality, and agriculture, and most have been homesteaders, O’Brien said, including a 73-year-old woman.

Since completing his certification last year, Kaʻohele Ritte-Camara has helped install several systems. He hopes to combine his agricultural background with his new skills to create a youth program that integrates renewables and food production. Clean energy aligns with the sustainable living practices that many homesteaders cherish, helping “keep us more rooted to the land,” he says. “It’s been transformative. I’m grateful to be part of this movement.”

Given Molokaʻi’s near-14 percent unemployment rate, clean tech jobs offer promising prospects in a fast-growing sector, especially for a Native population whose average household incomes fall more than 25 percent below the island median. But while workforce development programs can foster economic self-sufficiency, research suggests Native peoples often face limited advancement opportunities.

“Our end goal is an island workforce that can operate on all levels of the chain,”  O’Brien said, from individual technicians to full-service enterprises capable of building, maintaining and marketing the systems. The cooperative has applied to the Apprenticeship Building America program, a $95 million pool of Labor Department grants to promote apprenticeship programs in energy and other fields, to continue fostering “a garden of different opportunities,” he said.

Although the larger projects will initially require off-island contractors with utility-scale experience, Hoʻāhu will prioritize those that hire from within the community, and tighten stipulations as the local labor pipeline becomes more robust. 

“Most decisions about our energy infrastructure are made in boardrooms of utilities or big companies, yet community expertise offers a perspective that outside entities don’t conceive of,” said Ali Andrews, head of Honolulu-based Shake Energy Collaborative, Hoʻāhu’s development advisor. “The people who live there simply know their resources — sun and wind patterns, culturally sensitive sites, local labor dynamics — better.”

Fueled by grit, aloha ‘aina and a quest for sovereignty, Molokaʻi’s path to energy independence stands as an illuminating model of community-driven change, especially for other remote and rural locales. Still, the opportunity to forge it could have only happened there, said Chow.

“The PUC recognized that [traditional] approaches do not work at all on Molokaʻi,” she says. “They didn’t have much to lose by letting us do it our own way — but everything to gain.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline On a rural Hawaiian island, solar provides a path to energy sovereignty on Aug 9, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Naoki Nitta.

Tri-State generates and transmits power to 41 member cooperatives, which retail to 1 million customers in rural Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Nebraska (four states, despite the name). The customer base spans 200,000 square miles, more land than the entirety of California, with an average density of just five customers per mile of power line. Just a few years ago, two member cooperatives quit Tri-State to seek cheaper, cleaner power elsewhere. Since then, Tri-State has rolled out a series of clean energy commitments that it says will deliver 50 percent renewable electricity by the end of 2025, up from 33 percent in 2023.

The cooperative announced last week it will buy the forthcoming Axial Basin Solar, a 145-megawatt project in Moffat County, Colorado, and Dolores Canyon Solar, a 110-​megawatt project in Dolores County, Colorado. Both projects are still under construction, but they are slated to deliver power by late next year. Tri-State also signed three new power purchase agreements from solar plants that will come online by the end of this year.

Within days of that announcement, Tri-State also reported that electricity was flowing from the largest third-party solar project it has contracted for thus far, a 200-megawatt site developed by Origis Solar at the former Escalante Station coal-fired power plant in New Mexico. The cooperative also filed an innovative proposal with federal regulators to collaborate with its members that wish to generate clean energy for themselves locally.

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“In the past several months and years, Tri-State has been a very significant leader in the cooperative space in identifying ways to bring the benefits of clean energy to their members, and use the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act to a maximum degree,” said Uday Varadarajan, a senior principal at climate think tank RMI who tracks rural cooperative decarbonization. (Canary Media is an independent affiliate of RMI.)

This embrace of the energy transition was by no means guaranteed. America’s cooperative utilities, which deliver about 12 percent of the country’s electricity but serve 56 percent of its landscape, were at serious risk of getting left behind by the clean energy transition. The U.S. incubated its renewables industry with tax credits, which don’t do much good for the many federal, municipal, or cooperative utilities that generate power as not-for-profit corporations, and thus owe little to the IRS. Many cooperatives also signed very long-term contracts, which left them committed to paying for coal plants even after they might’ve wanted to switch to cleaner, cheaper alternatives.

Those conditions are changing now, thanks to the landmark climate policies passed in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Chief among them is a ​“direct pay” option that lets nonprofits access the same generous clean energy tax credits as their for-profit peers — even with little to no tax burden. Once Tri-State’s leadership saw clarity on the tax rules, they decided this was the time to strike.

“Not-for-profit cooperatives simply could not take advantage of those [renewable tax credits] because we did not have the tax liability to offset,” said Lee Boughey, vice president of communications at Tri-State. Now, though, he added, ​“We are pursuing the maximum amount of funding available for cooperatives.”

From incumbent to change agent

Back in 2016, at least a few local co-ops that buy power from Tri-State were chafing at its pace of decarbonization. New Mexico’s Kit Carson Electric Cooperative cut ties that year, paying a $37 million exit fee in order to buy power from a company called Guzman Energy and generate more clean energy locally. Colorado’s Delta-Montrose Electric Association soon followed suit. Guzman won them over with renewables-heavy portfolios that it said would save them money over time, compared to staying with Tri-State.

Tri-State kicked off a clean energy planning effort in 2019, and in late 2020 promised to cut carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2030 and shut down several coal plants. The latest solar investments represent strides toward that promise. 

Clean energy technologies and prices reached a different stage of maturity in the early 2020s compared to where they were in 2016, Boughey said. Now the utility sees ample savings and benefits for its customers in maximizing low-cost renewable generation, while ensuring it has enough ​“firm” power — today provided by coal and fossil gas plants — to keep the lights on. The utility recently hit a new record for instantaneous renewable production on May 24, when wind and solar delivered 87 percent of its generation for half an hour.

Cooperative customers are also shareholders, so the people who get to vote on the utility’s leadership are the same ones benefiting from lower-cost renewables. By investing in projects within its territory, Tri-State also supports economic development for its customer-owners. 

“You can pursue an energy transition and still retain that reliability and resilience even in the face of the challenging weather that utilities in the western U.S. can face,” said Boughey.

Inflation Reduction Act breaks down barriers for cooperatives

The Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, finally gave cooperatives a chance to avail themselves of the renewable power discounts that for-profit corporations with large tax burdens could access. But it also included a program specially designed to help rural co-ops deal with closing coal plants without burdening their customers with higher power prices.

Co-ops can’t raise money in quite the same ways as Wall Street–owned for-profit utilities do — they don’t issue stock to profit-hungry investors, for instance. To build new plants without piling steep rate hikes on customers, co-ops often borrow low-cost debt and pay it off over decades using the revenue from generating or transmitting power. Many co-ops, Tri-State included, are still paying off coal plants that they expected to run for decades more; shuttering them early, for climate or economic reasons, leaves customers saddled with an outstanding debt for something that no longer generates any value.

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This turns out to be one of the many obscure decarbonization challenges that the IRA tackled. It created a program at the U.S. Department of Agriculture called Empowering Rural America (New ERA for short), which offered up $9.7 billion to help rural utilities finance the transition from coal and support coal communities in the process. The program drew proposals for $93 billion worth of energy transition investment, from public and private sources (winning projects have not yet been announced).

“It did break down some of these barriers to make it easier than it was, and rural America showed up,” Varadarajan said. ​“It is pretty remarkable what has been proposed post-IRA by rural cooperatives.”

Tri-State used the new federal funding opportunity as a springboard for imagining the next phase of its clean energy transition. Its late-2023 proposal to Colorado utility regulators argues that federal funding, if awarded, could help move up the closure of coal plants Craig Station in 2028 and Springerville in 2031. Tri-State would fill the gap with 1,250 megawatts of wind, solar, and energy storage, including conventional lithium-ion batteries and novel iron-air batteries for multiday energy storage. The plan would also add a 290-megawatt combined-cycle natural gas plant with plans for carbon capture and sequestration. 

“We have to have the dispatchable capacity for when those renewable resources aren’t available,” Boughey said, noting that Tri-State goes beyond industry-standard reliability metrics to prepare the grid for extreme weather events, hot or cold.

Renewables purists may balk at the nod to carbon capture at a fossil-fueled plant, which has little precedent for economic success in the real world. But Tri-State frames that plant as more of a backup for moments when renewables can’t carry the day; and even with that new gas, the portfolio is projected to lower carbon emissions from Tri-State’s Colorado electricity generation by 89 percent by 2030, compared to the 2005 baseline. That reduction exceeds what Colorado requires of its utilities, the company noted — and the pace of many of the most progressive utilities nationwide.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This coal-heavy rural co-op utility is buying its first solar plants on Jun 22, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Julian Spector, Canary Media.

Padre Josimo Settlement

From 28 April, heavy rains, strong winds, and widespread flooding have lashed the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, killing over 160 people and impacting 2.3 million. The waters rose and rose again, rushing through houses and fields, erasing not only homes and the memories built there but also many crops in the country’s largest rice-producing state and agricultural powerhouse, the impacts of which are likely to reverberate across the nation.

Meteorological agencies and officials predicted the events with eerie precision. A week into the flood, experts pointed to the extraordinary rainfall as the primary cause. Estael Sias, managing director of the weather forecaster MetSul, wrote that this was not ‘just an episode of extreme rain’, but ‘a meteorological event whose adjectives are all superlative, from extraordinary to exceptional’. The seemingly unending rain, she wrote, ‘is absurdly and bizarrely different from what is normal’. It will take a very long time for this region of Brazil to recover from the flood.

Within the floodwaters are several encampments and settlements of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), about which we published a dossier last month to commemorate the movement’s 40th anniversary. The MST was born from land struggles in Rio Grande do Sul, where it retains a strong presence and has become the epicentre of the MST’s agroecological rice production. These are the same fields on which the MST grew much of the 13 tonnes of food that it donated to the Gaza Strip from October to December of last year and the more than 6,000 tonnes of food that it donated to communities in need during the COVID-19 pandemic, as we write in our dossier. Many of these fields, as well as the facilities used to process their harvests, have been damaged by the flood. Residents of MST settlements such as Apolônio de Carvalho and Integração Gaúcha Settlement have lost immense amounts of their resources.

The images in this newsletter, taken from a report by Brazil’s National Institute of Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) using satellite images from the Brazil M.A.I.S. Programme, Ministry of Justice and Public Safety, show some of the MST’s lands before and after the floods – lands now inundated with flood water that has washed toxic materials into the soil. The MST has focused its relief efforts not only on its own members, but also on the people of the region who have lost everything in the face of rising waters from which they cannot escape. If you wish to assist the MST in its flood relief efforts and to rebuild the settlements, you can do so here.

Santa Maria Settlement

Last year, after a much less serious flood impacted Porto Alegre (the capital of Rio Grande do Sul), the Brazilian architect Mima Feltrin, drawing from the work of hydrology professor Carlos Tucci, warned that the state faced an imminent risk of flooding equal to or worse than the historic floods of 1941 and 1967. The analyses of scholars such as Tucci and Feltrin have repeatedly warned about the impact and looming threats of carbon emissions-driven climate change across the world as well as the deficiencies of policies put in place by reckless climate change denialist politicians.

As floodwaters rose in Rio Grande do Sul in 2023, so too did they inundate Derna (Libya), central Greece, southern China, southern Nevada (United States), and northeastern Turkey. The immediate explanation for these floods is that they are caused by carbon emissions-driven climate change, intensified by the refusal of Global North governments to contain their outsized carbon emissions. But the broader explanation is that the climate catastrophe is largely the product of reckless capitalist development, particularly in cities located within areas that are predictably dangerous to inhabit (such as lowland coastal settlements built next to savaged mangrove forests and badly managed river flow or beside forests that face long periods of dry weather). This reckless development is exacerbated by the rampant underfunding of environmental regulatory agencies and the deliberate slashing of budgets that maintain and revitalise infrastructure that is crucial to protect people from adverse climate events. With the flood in Libya, for instance, the state – already destroyed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s harsh bombardment in 2011 and pickled in confusion and corruption – neglected the crumbling dams of Derna. Much the same kind of attitude has been on display in southern Brazil for the past several decades.

Sino Settlement

The two most recent mayors of Porto Alegre, Nelson Marchezan Júnior (2017–2021) and Sebastião Melo (2021–present), as well as the governor of Rio Grande do Sul Eduardo Leite (2019–March 2022 and then January 2023–present) spent their tenures eroding the basic institutions of their administrations. Governor Leite, for instance, undermined 480 rules of his state’s environmental code as part of the anti-environmental agenda pursued by the far-right President Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022). Meanwhile, Mayor Marchezan Júnior ignored the need to fund flood prevention infrastructure, including the renovation of thirteen pump houses that were central to Porto Alegre’s drainage system, and his administration shut down the entire Department of Storm Drainage Systems (DEP), which had been set up in 1973 to manage drainage. Marchezan Júnior and Melo, along with their predecessor José Fortunati, each cut the number of employees in the departments that managed sewage and water systems.

People such as Leite, Marchezan Júnior, and Melo hold an attitude of disregard for the majority of the population and an attitude of the highest regard for the offshore bank accounts of the wealthy and their friends, the Western investor class. These people have been shaped by Brazilian big business, whose interests are consolidated by groups such as Instituto Liberal, set up in 1983 to further the neoliberal ideas of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and by intellectuals of the military dictatorship (1964–1985) such as its economic ministers Roberto Campos and Hélio Beltrão. These ideas were brought into the mainstream by Brazil’s former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2003), whose Plan for the Reform of the State Apparatus (1995) used the idea of ‘modernisation’ to undermine state institutions and to start what Professor Elaine Rossetti Behring called a period of ‘permanent fiscal adjustment’. Cardoso, Leite, Marchezan Júnior, and Melo are Men of Austerity, proponents of a counter-revolution against humanity.

Filhos de Sepé Settlement

When the catastrophe comes, as it has in Rio Grande do Sul, these neoliberal officials are quick to blame climate change, as if it were some sort of inevitability in which they played no part. However, when it comes to the climate, these people are the first to advance the agenda of fossil fuel companies and promote ideas and policies that amount to climate change denialism. Their denialism is not rooted in science, but in class interests that prioritise big business over people and the planet. They do not have any scientific arguments to explain the climate catastrophe, since there is no scientific basis for denialism, which seeks – with complete disregard for the fate of the planet – to ensure the upward distribution of wealth.

From 1968 to 1980, the Brazilian poet Mário Quintana (1906–1994) lived in the Majestic Hotel in Porto Alegre, where he wrote beautiful poems of what he called ‘simple things’. Shortly before Quintana died, his supporters and friends built the Casa de Cultura Mário Quintana in the Majestic Hotel, which the state government purchased, restored, and transformed into a cultural centre in the 1980s. This hotel, Quintana’s home, became a haven for writers and artists to show their work. It was inundated by this year’s flood.

In 1976, from that hotel, Quintana wrote ‘A Grande Enchente’ (‘The Great Flood’), motivated by the floods of 1941 and 1967:

Cadavers of Ophelias and dead dogs
stopped momentarily at our doors,
though, ever at the mercy of the maelstrom,
they will continue along their uncertain path.

When the water reaches the highest windows
I will paint roses of fire on our yellow faces.
What does it matter what is to come?
The mad are spared all
and allow themselves everything.

Let us embark, spirit of the Gods.
Over the waters we glide.
Some say that we are merely clouds.
Others, the few, say that we are increasingly dying,
but I cannot see, down below, our dead.

And in vain I look around.
Where are you, friends,
from the very first and last days?
We must, we must, we must continue together.
And so, in one last, diluted thought,
I feel that my cry is but the gasp of the wind.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

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Join us for a virtual discussion of how private schools known as “segregation academies” in the Deep South continue to preserve divisions within communities even 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education.

In the rural community of Wilcox County, Alabama, a Black principal is working to empower students in the segregated public high school. A Black woman is grappling with demons of the county’s past. A white woman is digging into that history. A white high school graduate is realizing the importance of interracial friendships. Others are using art to bridge divides.

ProPublica is examining the lasting effects of “segregation academies,” private schools that opened across the Deep South in opposition to desegregation. In our first story, we wrote about how the local academy in Wilcox is nearly all white while the public schools are virtually all Black. As a result, people don’t often know one another well. When we asked local residents how often they have ever invited someone of another race over for dinner, we heard variations of, “That would be very uncommon.”

Although people haven’t often forged those deeper relationships, we met many who said they want to. We met others who are already doing so.

They confront a long and painful legacy of racism. They battle the inertia of “the way things are.” And they must build trust across racial divides where it often hasn’t existed before.

Shelly Dallas Dale still has flashbacks to being sprayed with tear gas, especially that first time.

Dale was 16 years old in 1971 when she joined a march in downtown Camden, 40 miles south of Selma in the heart of Alabama’s Black Belt, to protest its segregated schools. She and 428 others were arrested for “illegal marching.” They included 87 students. In an article about the march, the local newspaper called them “deluded blacks.”

Dale had grown up afraid of white people, but she still summoned her courage to join the Civil Rights Movement as it unfolded in Camden — even though protestors had lost their jobs and faced violence and arrests.

Before the desegregation march, she had become so fearful for her safety that she wrote her own obituary. Then she went to her older sister with a request. “This is the dress,” she recalled saying. “If I should get killed, bury me in it.”

At the march, someone fired tear gas at her. A white man shot her younger sister, she said, the bullet rocketing across the girl’s back just beneath the skin. But Dale and her family remained determined that Black students in Wilcox County should have access to the same educational opportunities as white children. She would march again — and face tear gas again.

Dale went on to become the county’s long-serving (and first female) tax assessor, a role that brought her into contact with every type of person — including the white people who had traumatized her and other Black children.

She tried to face her fear each day. She said she got to know people beyond the flashbacks and the years of fighting for basic rights like voting and school equality.

“I think it has helped me to embrace people more,” she said. “And to look beyond the evil side.”

Unlike many Black residents of Wilcox County during the 1950s and 1960s, Betty Anderson’s father did not work for a white man. For more than four decades, Joe Anderson ran the Camden Shoe Shop in the heart of downtown. Because he was his own boss, he joined local actions in the Civil Rights Movement without the fear for his livelihood that others, including sharecropping families, faced.

When his health declined in 2006, Betty Anderson moved back to help him. She had spent 42 years away, including a stint modeling in New York, but quickly became a fixture again in Wilcox County.

To honor her father and other family members, she opened the Camden Shoe Shop & Quilt Museum in his old building. The sidewalk leading up to it is painted shades of rose, azure and forest green. A pillow embroidered with “Welcome” sits on the arm of an old chair adorned with flowers. Inside its colorful doors awaits an array of artwork and historical memorabilia, much of it from her own relatives.

Her whole family was involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited their home. Activists stayed with them. Her grandmother and other family living in nearby Gee’s Bend made quilts to earn money for demonstrators’ gas and other needs.

The museum features quilts made by her great-great-grandmother, who had been enslaved and passed the craft down to later generations. Her father’s 1965 voting card and his 1967 NAACP membership card are on display. So are the jeans and a shoe Anderson herself wore in the historic 1965 march from the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to the state capital of Montgomery, Alabama, 54 miles away. Her Converse — black with a red stripe — has two golf-ball-sized holes worn into its sole.

Anderson marched again for voting rights in Camden a few weeks later with classmates from her school. Although Wilcox County was mostly Black, virtually none of its registered voters were. Police arrested her middle brother. They jailed her youngest brother, just 8 years old, in Selma. For hours, nobody knew where he was.

Despite the pain she lived through, Anderson is one of the people in Camden who seems to know everyone in town — Black and white. An upbeat and gregarious woman, she has no qualms crossing racial lines and is a frequent presence at activities held by both Black and white residents. She opens her eclectic museum as a local gathering spot.

Frequent visitors include the women who work in the nearby Black Belt Treasures Cultural Arts Center. Anderson is an artist in residence there, but the organization means much more to her. In a town where white and Black neighbors remain apart in many ways, she and the white women who run it have become close friends.

When Black Belt Treasures launched in 2005, one goal rose above others: Its founders wanted to craft a new narrative, one that had gone largely untold in a region often defined by poverty and need.

To do this, they wanted to draw people off the interstate and into Alabama’s Black Belt — particularly Camden, in the heart of it — to see for themselves.

“We have gotten so much negative press and yet there’s a richness of life here,” Executive Director Sulynn Creswell said. “We have problems, but there are many, many talented, gifted people who live in this region.”

Among other things, Black Belt Treasures operates a gallery in a former car dealership that is now filled with paintings and pottery and quilts fashioned by hundreds of artists from across the region. Its staffers also work with tourism efforts and take myriad arts programs out into schools and the broader community.

Creswell and the center’s other employees have been key players in revitalizing downtown Camden, including playing a role in the creation of a colorful “Revolution of Joy” mural on a building between their gallery and Betty Anderson’s museum. All of their names are painted on it, along with those of a diverse group of people from around the county who came together to add their own artistic touches. Creswell and Kristin Law, who directs the center’s art programs and marketing, also were founding members of a local racial reconciliation group. The women, who are white, emphasized that they want the community to come together more — and they see the arts as a prime vehicle for that.

“Yes, we have had our bad history,” Law said. “But we are also a beautiful place with beautiful people, and we’re all trying to work together to make a better place.”

That includes two teenagers who work with them. Jazmyne Posey is a Black student at the local public high school. While working in the gallery, she met and befriended Law’s daughter, Samantha Cook, who is white and attends Wilcox Academy, the local private school. The other key women on staff here also have sent their children to the academy.

In a town that is otherwise still segregated, especially in its schools, the two teenagers forged a friendship that likely would never have happened if they had relied on their school encounters.

In 1975, a few years after the private Wilcox Academy opened in Camden when schools were being desegregated, a young white woman named Susan McIntyre took a job there.

During her 12 years teaching French, she admired the school’s instruction and met families whose ancestors had owned plantations in the area. She sent her two daughters to the school and became close friends with another white woman whose children were about the same age.

Back then, it was unheard of, she said, for a Black student to attend the academy, and none did. After growing up in a white world, she didn’t think much about why.

Later, she took a job teaching in the county’s mostly Black public schools, where she still works. She interacted with Black students and teachers far more than ever before in her life.

One day, while watching a group of Black students, a thought struck her. She wondered what message generations of school segregation had sent them. It was, she feared, an unjust lesson of inferiority.

She began to read every book she could find in the local library about slavery. She dug into the ways desegregation played out in Wilcox County — and how it continues to affect students. It was hard to ignore the role Wilcox Academy had played in the continued segregation of students.

“This is the thing that’s haunted me for years,” she said. “What if we had never started the private school?”

The public schools in Wilcox County remain nearly all Black. But in recent years, a few Black students have crossed the county’s racial divide to enroll at the academy.

In August 2020, McIntyre’s granddaughter Anna Crosswhite was about to start her junior year at Wilcox Academy when she volunteered to be a water girl for the football team. One day, she noticed four Black students watching practice. Recognizing a couple of them from her brother’s summer baseball league, she walked over to say hello.

The guys explained that COVID-19 had shut down the public school’s football season. As upperclassmen, they didn’t want to miss their last years of high school sports and they were thinking of applying to the academy.

Crosswhite, who is white and has an adopted brother from China, was excited about the prospect of the academy’s student body becoming more diverse.She only knew of one Black student at the school. And with just 23 students in her class, she liked the possibility of new friends.

She also thought back to when she was younger and volunteered at BAMA Kids Inc., a local nonprofit. Once in a while, she heard Black youth volunteers say things like, “Girl, we’re not allowed at your school.” Maybe the new students would help change that perception.

But old notions lingered. She said she heard pushback from other academy students, although she didn’t want to divulge details that would identify her classmates.

“We were 50 years behind,” she said. “I didn’t realize how behind we were.”

The academy admitted the football players, and Crosswhite said she became friends with them. Although they hung out on the weekends and often went out to eat together, she never went into any of their homes. But she got to know them far better than she would have if they hadn’t gone to school together.

Now a student at Auburn University, she is studying to become a teacher and sees how those friendships better prepared her for what she calls “the real world.”

When a bell blared at Wilcox Central High School one morning this spring, the principal slipped from behind his desk beneath a stuffed deer head with blue school baseball caps propped on its antlers.

Curtis Black emerged into a hallway filled with students who, like him, grew up in a segregated school. Not a single white student attended the one he went to in a neighboring county. He realized the detriments of isolating students this way when he arrived at college and encountered a wider variety of people.

Due to population decline in Wilcox County, the school operates in a building far bigger than its student body of about 400 can fill. Where once the county had three public high schools, it now has just this one. When the centralized school opened in this building near downtown Camden, complete with a competition-size swimming pool, many hoped it offered what white parents wanted — and that they might give it a chance.

That didn’t happen. But Black carefully avoided criticizing Wilcox Academy. Instead, he rattled off programs that his school offers. Students can access the high school’s medical-training lab, its agriculture lab, its welding lab. They can take dual credit courses with area community colleges. They can earn certifications.

As principal, he wants to create broader opportunities for his students, many of whom descend from people who were enslaved in this area. Their grandparents were traumatized by violent reactions to the Civil Rights Movement. His goals include exposing them more to the outside world and providing them the academic tools to land quality jobs out of high school or to succeed in college.

This spring, walking down the school’s hallways, he pointed to the senior class.

“In two or three months, they’re going to be around people from different backgrounds, different ethnic groups, different Christian groups,” Black said. “So we need that exposure.”

Help ProPublica Report on Education

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Berry Hawes, photography by Sarahbeth Maney.

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Citing ProPublica’s reporting on barriers to mental health care access for veterans, the chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, Jon Tester, called on VA Secretary Denis McDonough to increase the number of providers in rural parts of the country.

Tester sent a letter to McDonough this month raising concerns about mental health staffing shortages nationwide. In it, he referenced ProPublica’s investigation into a VA clinic in Chico, California, that went five years without a full-time, on-site psychiatrist and failed to have same-day appointments for patients in crisis. Two veterans who struggled to get treatment there killed their mothers during acute mental health episodes in January 2022.

“While I understand the Chico (clinic) now has several full-time mental health care providers and offers same-day appointments, I am concerned this was not an isolated issue considering VA’s shortage of mental health care providers,” Tester wrote.

Tester asked McDonough how many VA clinics currently lack in-person mental health providers and how many are equipped to facilitate telehealth appointments. He also inquired about how the VA ensures same-day mental health visits are available at all facilities.

“I commend the Department for all of its efforts to decrease veterans’ barriers to mental health care and bolster suicide prevention efforts,” he wrote. “Nevertheless, VA must continue to lead the effort to increase the number of mental health providers and ensure those providers are in locations where veterans need them most.”

In a statement to ProPublica, VA Press Secretary Terrence Hayes said the agency appreciated Tester’s letter and would respond directly.

Hayes noted the agency has several initiatives to increase capacity for mental health care, including an expansion of virtual services and a new team focused on growing the staffing pipeline. “One of our top priorities is to provide the world-class mental health care that Veterans deserve, whenever and wherever they need it,” he said.

ProPublica’s reporting grew out of an inquiry by the VA’s inspector general into one of the two Chico cases. The inspector general concluded the clinic had mismanaged that patient’s medications and failed to give her an appointment with a prescribing provider when she showed up at the clinic in crisis.

The patient, ProPublica learned, was a 27-year-old Navy veteran named Julia Larsen who had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and was experiencing symptoms of psychosis. When Larsen couldn’t get an appointment that day, she went home with her parents and fired a handgun inside their home. One of the bullets she discharged struck her mother in the thigh, killing her.

ProPublica’s reporting revealed that a second veteran who had been receiving mental health treatment at the clinic also shot his mother that same week. Andrew Iles had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and believed his relatives were conspiring against him. The day after Larsen’s shooting, he called the Chico clinic to speak with a mental health doctor. Instead, he was put through to a pharmacist. He killed his mother the next afternoon. Both Larsen and Iles have been found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a state-run psychiatric hospital.

ProPublica found evidence of systemic staffing issues in the clinic’s mental health department. The VA had tried to plug the holes with telehealth providers, but several had quit or stopped seeing Chico patients. Employees begged regional leaders for more personnel and resources, they told ProPublica. One said she warned her colleagues, “We are going to kill someone.”

ProPublica also found failures in mental health care at VA clinics across the country. At least 16 veterans who received substandard care since 2019 killed either themselves or other people, a review of records revealed.

After ProPublica’s investigation was published in early January, McDonough traveled to Chico and promised to increase staffing in the clinic’s mental health unit. “We have a very fast-growing veteran population here in Chico,” he told a local reporter. “We have to make sure that we are growing commensurate with that population so that they can get the timely access to care and the timely access to benefits that they have earned.”

Tester’s letter raised continued concerns. He pointed to a December 2023 report from the VA that found the number of outpatient mental health encounters or treatment visits ballooned from 11.4 million in 2008 to 21.8 million in 2019 and that staffing shortages have persisted. Tester also noted in-person mental health services tend to be clustered at large VA medical centers in urban areas, while nearly a third of veterans enrolled in VA health care live in rural areas.

In rural regions, Tester wrote, “losing just one or two providers can have a massive impact on essential access to mental health care and once those providers are gone, it can take years to fill their vacancies and even longer to encourage those patients to return to care.”

Tester acknowledged the VA’s recent progress in improving access to mental health services. But he urged McDonough to press forward.

“More needs to be done,” he wrote, “specifically in rural areas, to keep pace with increased demand and prevent gaps in care that can have dire impacts on veterans and their families.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by ProPublica.

After a year-long legal battle with a railroad company over their land, landowners in a rural, majority-Black town in Georgia may be forced to sell their homes. 

In an initial decision on April 1, a Georgia Public Service Commission officer approved a proposed rail spur in Sparta. Several property owners had refused to sell the land to Sandersville Railroad Co. In March, the centuries-old, white-owned private railroad company sought to acquire the property through eminent domain — a process that allows the government to take private land for public use. However, property owners must receive fair compensation. 

The company petitioned the state’s public service commission to condemn the land parcels from 18 property owners along Shoals Road. The railroad company planned to construct a 4.5-mile rail spur that would connect the Hanson Quarry, a rock mine owned by Heidelberg Materials, to a main train line along a nearby highway. The proposed project would create 20 temporary construction jobs, a dozen permanent jobs averaging $90,000 a year in salary and benefits, and bring in over $1.5 million annually to Hancock County.

However, residents in the town of 2,000 told Capital B in September that they didn’t want to sell their land, or that they fear the potential damage to their homes from the train. Many others say they never received a notice from the railroad company and only found out about the project at a local community meeting last year.  

The Georgia Public Service Commission held a three-day hearing in late November. The Institute for Justice, a nonprofit, public interest law firm, and residents argued the railroad project is an abuse of eminent domain that doesn’t serve the public or benefit the community. 

Benjamin Tarbutton III, Sandersville Railroad’s president, testified that economic development is important to him and “the American dream starts with a job.” He believes his railroad project will provide jobs, which is why he deems the project public use. 

Bill Maurer, an attorney with Institute for Justice who represents Sparta property owners, later asked Tarbutton: “Do you think part of the American dream is having property without it being taken for others’ use?”

“I’m going to stick with my first comment,” Tarbutton said.

During Sparta native Marvin Smith’s testimony, he also mentioned the American dream. Smith, a military veteran, owns property that was passed down to him from his father. His grandfather, James Blaine Smith, acquired 600 acres in 1926.

“The American dream says if you play by the rules and work hard, justice will prevail, and you will be rewarded,” he said. “It never occurred to me … over 43 years of playing by the rules … I would end up in a position where my land could be taken through eminent domain.”

Despite the residents’ plea, Thomas K. Bond, hearing officer for the public service commission, ruled in favor of the railroad company.

“I therefore find and conclude that the proposed condemnation by the Sandersville Railroad serves a legitimate public purpose and is necessary for proper accommodation of the business of the company,” Bond wrote. “The petition of Sandersville Railroad, as amended, is granted.”

The fight isn’t over, and the initial decision isn’t the final say in the case. Property owners, who are represented by the Institute for Justice, will challenge the ruling. They have 30 days to appeal.

There have been efforts to make it harder for companies to use eminent domain after the widely cited Kelo v. City of New London case. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government taking private property to facilitate a private development for economic benefits is considered to be a public use. Since then, at least 44 states have passed laws to alleviate the abuse.

“When the U.S. Supreme Court issued the unpopular and widely condemned Kelo decision, the Georgia General Assembly passed strict reforms to ensure that nothing like that would happen in this state. Today’s initial decision essentially undoes that work,” Maurer said in a statement. “We will fight to ensure that the people of the state of Georgia are protected from this kind of abuse at every stage we can.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rural Georgia community battles railroad trying to take their land on Apr 21, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Aallyah Wright, Capital B.

This article was produced in partnership with Source New Mexico, which was a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in 2023. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In February 2023, I signed a lease on a dusty studio apartment in Las Vegas, New Mexico, two hours from my apartment in Albuquerque and just outside the burn scar of the largest wildfire in New Mexico history. Based on the railroad ties that served as “vigas,” or ceiling beams, my landlord told me my new home had likely been built in the late 1800s.

The rural communities in the mountains of northern New Mexico have long been wary of outsiders. More than a century ago, a band of white-capped marauders on horseback, known as the Gorras Blancas, rode through the countryside to fight back against the predominantly white speculators and railroad barons taking over the land. The Gorras Blancas cut through newly built fences dividing shared pastureland, known as the “ejido,” and burned piles of railroad ties. But they failed to repel the newcomers, who built Victorian homes on what became the town’s well-to-do east side.

My apartment was on the historically Hispanic, lower-income west side. I had moved there at the beginning of a yearlong collaboration between my newsroom, Source New Mexico, and ProPublica to examine the area’s recovery from the fire. The federal government had accidentally triggered the blaze; now the Federal Emergency Management Agency was in charge of distributing checks to compensate people for the government’s mistake. I knew some survivors wouldn’t appreciate being interviewed by someone they perceived as an outsider, even though I’m from New Mexico and have lived here most of my life. For the next year, my job was to gain their trust.

The fire had broadened divisions among residents: between those who had suffered and those who had been spared; between those who had money to rebuild and those who had to wait for a check from FEMA; between those angry at how long it was taking to be paid and those who had taken jobs with FEMA to help process their neighbors’ claims.

The Big Burnout: Wildland Firefighters and the West

Join Source New Mexico reporter Patrick Lohmann on March 26 for a virtual discussion about New Mexico’s grindingly slow recovery from the state’s biggest wildfire and the exodus of wildland firefighters from the U.S. Forest Service.

I introduced myself to the community in a column published in the weekly newspaper, the Optic, asking people to get in touch. I then set about speaking to anyone willing to open up about the trauma of the disaster, what they saw as a painfully slow release of compensation funds and disaster aid, their fears about losing their culture and their realization that this place had permanently changed. That meant showing up early to public meetings at high school gyms, carrying a stack of business cards and speaking with frustrated survivors until janitors threatened to turn off the lights.

And I worked the phones. After a bit of pestering, a county assessor marked down all the houses she knew had been lost in the fire. I called every property owner, often reaching people who were living far away until they could rebuild or were making do in RVs, friends’ homes, and even, in one case, a tent. Many people were reluctant to talk; some said it was too painful to discuss what they had been through.

One man pretended to speak only Spanish to get me off the phone; I spoke just enough Spanish to convince him to chat with me in English. He taught me a Spanish phrase with a special meaning for those who speak a disappearing dialect unique to the region: “No le busques tres pies del gato sabiendo que tiene quatro.” It means, “Don’t look for three legs on a cat knowing it has four.” He meant it both as a joke and a warning: Tread carefully. He turned out to be friendly, later showing me around his damaged property.

People soon began to recognize me around town. They invited me to sit down and listen in on conversations they were having about the fire that had changed their lives and the long recovery that now consumed their attention. (FEMA officials have said they worked as quickly as they could on a mission that is far different from their typical job of providing short-term disaster aid.)

Many of those conversations reflected the randomness of this disaster, in which some properties were burned to their foundations and others were untouched. Some people had survivors’ guilt; others nursed bitterness. I remember when Juan Ortiz, a rancher, told me that someone with a second home in the area had complained about his own house being spared; the man had hoped to collect the insurance money. Ortiz was devastated over the loss of his home and livelihood. He wished he still had his father’s book collection.

Byard Duncan, an engagement reporter with ProPublica, came out to help in June, about five months after my arrival. We recorded public service announcements and participated in call-in shows on local radio stations, went to church services and set up a folding table at a farmers market in Las Vegas. By then, we knew that the region’s spotty internet access was a barrier to getting people to fill out an online form that we had posted in English and Spanish. We drove over and around the mountains, passing out more than 300 flyers with our contact information at diners, gas stations, grocery stores and post offices.

Over those months, I observed the recovery up close. I drove to and from interviews on roads still washed out from the floods that followed the fire. Panicked survivors called me when a small wildfire started in Las Tusas, in an area that had been untouched by the blaze the year before. Like my neighbors, I watched the horizon for storm clouds, wary of the flooding that had become common because the fire-scarred soil couldn’t absorb rainwater. Notices were regularly dropped in my mailbox warning of potential contaminants in the city’s water supply, which had been polluted after the fire.

The many people who generously spoke with us — more than 100 over the course of the year — were vital to our work. The Optic, which has a print circulation of about 3,000, published all our major stories. That’s where most of our sources read them.

Donato Sena, an elderly man who lost his home in the hard-hit village of Rociada, was familiar with my reporting on the fire when I met him. Over the course of several conversations, he told me how grueling life had been in the last year. He and several other survivors had testified in depositions about their losses because they were concerned they would die before they were paid.

Sena had been through four bouts of cancer, which was then in remission. But one day in November, as I was nearing the end of my lease, he collapsed while carrying groceries into his temporary home. The day he died, his wife later told me, he was hopeful he’d be able to move into their new manufactured home on their old property by Christmas.

I heard about his death a day later from a volunteer for a group that donated money to survivors struggling to get by. Over the next few days, four friends of his invited me to his memorial service.

I left my notebook in my car when I arrived at a historic church near the Las Vegas plaza to pay my respects alongside more than 100 others. As Sena’s casket was carried to a hearse, I nodded in acknowledgment to those who followed, people I’d met over the past year: his lawyer, volunteers for the aid group, two others who lost their homes, a columnist for the Optic and various local officials. A few days later, Sena’s widow and their daughter graciously invited me into their home for an interview.

After the funeral, I drove back to my apartment to find a chicken roosting on my patio chair. I walked around the block, seeking her owner. Neighbors told me she might’ve belonged to a guy who recently moved away. I posted to a local Facebook group, and within 15 minutes four folks offered to take her in. A man who lived up the street arrived in a pickup truck. We chatted about the fire, the sort of small talk that had become part of practically every conversation I had there. He tucked the chicken under his arm, and I got back to work.

Patrick is still working on the story of the wildfire and its aftermath. Send him tips at PLohmann@SourceNM.com.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico.

The inauguration of the committee followed just about a week after the country’s leader Kim Jong Un made a rare public acknowledgement of the dire state of his country’s economy, urging ruling party officials to take immediate action.

“In the midst of actively promoting organizational work to thoroughly and perfectly implement transformative strategies for local industrial development, the non-permanent 20×10 Local Development Central Implementation Committee has embarked on its official projects,” North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency said Tuesday.

The 20×10 Local Development Policy refers to a measure announced by Kim earlier this month, aimed at improving the North’s struggling local economies. The measure involves constructing industrial factories throughout 20 counties across the nation each year, and ultimately improve the living standards of the North Korean people within the next 10 years.

Led by a Presidium of the Politburo member of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, Jo Yong Won, the committee will “oversee and guide the construction progress, including the design and construction of new local industrial factories, as well as the development projects for raw material bases,” KCNA said.

The importance of the newly established committee is reflected in the fact that Jo also holds a position as a secretary of the Secretariat of the WPK, a close associate and advisory body of the North Korean leader. Vice Premier Pak Jong Gun, whose main responsibility is overseeing the nation’s economy, was also included in the committee.

Kim last week labeled the country’s ongoing economic problem as a “serious political issue,” saying that his government was unable “to provide even basic necessities such as basic foodstuffs, groceries, and consumer goods to the local people.”

“The overall local economy is currently in a very pitiful state, lacking even basic conditions,” Kim said at a politburo plenary meeting last week, according to KCNA.

North Korea’s economy contracted for the third consecutive year in 2022, according to South Korea’s Statistics Korea report in December. The latest available data showed a 0.2% year-on-year drop in North Korea’s GDP in 2022, following a 0.1% decrease in 2021, and a 4.5% contraction in 2020.

On a closer look, the country’s manufacturing industry shrank for six consecutive years since 2017, with it contracting 4.6% in 2022, according to the latest available data from the South’s central bank, Bank of Korea. The economic impact of this to the nation may have been severe as the sector accounts more than 20% of the North’s entire economy.

A major mission of the committee is to revive the manufacturing sector. 

“Establishing practical measures to solidify local raw material bases and ensure the normalization of production in local industrial factories is also one of the important tasks of the Central Implementation Committee,” according to KCNA.

Kim has been facing issues related to the economy and food shortages since he assumed power in 2012. These problems have been intensified recently amid the aftermath of COVID-19 and international sanctions.

North Korea shut down its borders for the COVID quarantine at the expense of its trade with China, while it has continued its nuclear and missile development, putting its economy under the United Nations’ sanctions regime.

Amid economic challenges, North Korea has recently been ramping up its military threats in the Korean peninsula. According to South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff Tuesday, the North fired multiple “unidentified cruise missiles” off its western coast at around 7 a.m. 

North Korea also test-fired submarine-launched cruise missiles Sunday, with Kim ordering officials to expedite his country’s nuclear submarine development.  

Edited by Taejun Kang and Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lee Jeong-Ho for RFA.

Will and Julie Volpert have led white water rafting trips on Southern Oregon’s Rogue and Klamath rivers for over a decade for their company Indigo Creek Outfitters, out of the small town of Talent, Oregon. The rafting season, which extends from May to September, is a perfect time to be out on the river where snowpack-fed cold water provides respite from the region’s hot summer.

Or it would be perfect if wildfire smoke weren’t a looming concern. 

“We’ve been in operation here since 2011, and almost every year there’s some smoke that comes in and is noticeable on our trips,” Will Volpert said in an interview. If people have flexibility, he recommends that they schedule a trip before the third week of July when the likelihood of smoke in the air is lower.

Customers frequently cancel in late July and August because of the smoke, especially for day-trips. Federal data shows air quality tends to be more than four times worse on average in Jackson County, Oregon, during this period than earlier in the summer.

“We’ve gotten very used to saying, ‘Hey, it’s very likely going to be smoky on your trip. It might not be, but it could be.’” Volpert said. But as long as they’re not putting their participants at risk, Volpert said, they won’t cancel a rafting trip because of wildfire smoke.

Running a business affected by wildfire smoke has become normal for the Volperts, but it hasn’t come without its personal toll. 

“I used to get very stressed out and paralyzed with the idea of losing our summer, which for us is, as the owners of this small business, our livelihood,” Volpert said. 

While Volpert says he’s learned to manage that anxiety, wildfire smoke is a frequent source of stress for many people living in rural communities. The smoke harms farms and recreation-based businesses, can be psychologically triggering for wildfire survivors, frequently drives residents indoors, and recent research showed it’s associated with increases in rural suicides.

Wildfire smoke has become a pervasive form of air pollution released from intensifying fires due to the warming effects of heat-trapping pollution and a litany of other environmental changes.

Southwestern Oregon experienced unhealthy air from wildfire smoke nearly 13 days each year on average from 2013 through the end of 2022 — up from one to two days on average from 1985 through 2012, according to a report by Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality that used data from the town of Medford, about 10 miles northwest of Talent where Indigo Creek Outfitters is based.

Smoke pollution exacerbates asthma, worsens infections and contributes to a variety of other physical maladies. Tiny smoke particles move from lungs into bloodstreams and can directly affect brain health, with research out of the University of Montana connecting smoke exposure to the development of dementia. 

Its noxious effects on mental health, particularly on rural communities, tend to receive less discussion.

Hidden dangers in rural valleys

Southern Oregon’s Rogue Valley is at the heart of a region synonymous with white water rafting, rock climbing, and other outdoor activities in the Klamath Mountains and Cascade Range. Vineyards and pear orchards dot the valley, and in the mid-size town of Ashland at the valley’s south end, the annual Oregon Shakespeare Festival boasts international recognition. 

All these activities hinge on good summer weather, and during the past decade, they’ve been disrupted by wildfire smoke, directly affecting wages, profits and reducing overall quality of life.

“In rural areas there’s likely more people whose livelihoods are based on the land and working outside,” said Colleen Reid, a health geographer and environmental epidemiologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder who studies the health effects of wildfire smoke.

In the valley, wildfire smoke settles more easily and often sticks around longer than it does in the surrounding mountains and plains. Atmospheric conditions often arise in valleys that keep smoke close to the ground, where its effect is the strongest. This can trigger more than physical ailments like asthma.

“We’re increasingly seeing mental health impacts,” Reid said. While early research focused on the effects of flames from wildfires, she said “there are some more recent studies where even individuals who were just affected by the smoke could have mental health impacts.”

By trapping people inside homes and forcing the cancellation of outdoor social events like youth sports, smoke can contribute to loneliness, domestic quibbling and despair. 

A study published last fall in the science journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences linked smoke exposure with increases in suicides among rural populations, though not among urban ones.

“In rural areas, we find that smoke days are significantly associated with increases in suicide rates,” said David Molitor, a health economist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who led the research, which drew on 13 years of smoke and federal suicide data to track mental health effects. 

Because deaths from suicide are tracked by the federal government, they can be a useful measurement reflecting mental health, which is otherwise difficult to research and track. And that federal data shows that rural Americans are about a third more likely to die from suicide than those living in cities or suburbs. 

“I think what’s different with rural people is they have access to guns, and they’re much more effective at succeeding in their efforts,” said Joseph Schroeder, a disaster response veteran and former mental health extension specialist at the University of Kentucky with experience  working at and running crisis hotlines for farmers and other rural residents. 

Suicide ideation often arises from desperate needs for financial aid and other help, more so than poor mental health. This puts residents of rural communities that have been hollowed out following closures of timber, manufacturing and other employment-rich industries at greater risk.

“From my experience, the despair that has become suicidal ideation, or a suicidal threat, they’ve all come from conversations I’ve had with people who are calling me to get out of a situational problem — mostly financial,” Schroeder said. “It’s a poverty problem and it’s an isolation problem. And that looks differently in rural communities than it does in urban communities.”

The Almeda fire

Come smoke or shine, Indigo Creek Outfitters – Volpert’s white water rafting company in Talent – always operates. 

But on the morning of September 8, 2020, Volpert knew something was different about the wind whipping through the trees around his house outside of Phoenix, just three miles from Talent. The weather was so unusual he canceled the Upper Klamath rafting trip planned for that day. 

“That is literally the only time that I can remember ever pulling the plug on one of our trips,” Volpert said. A few hours after making that decision, Talent and Phoenix were engulfed in flames. 

The wildfire, known as the Almeda Fire, was the most destructive in Oregon history: About 3,000 buildings burned, most of them homes. Three people and many more animals died.

Analysis of weather station data shows the Almeda Fire broke out during a bout of fire weather — when conditions are persistently dry, warm and windy. The area was in extreme drought at the time, setting up conditions conducive for an extreme wildfire once winds strengthened. It took more than a week for firefighters to extinguish the flames completely.

After surviving a wildfire that completely changed the lives of so many in the Rogue Valley, there’s an added layer of grief that comes with the smoke season. 

“For me, [smoke] causes a lot of anxiety,” said Jocksana Corona. The mobile home in Talent where she lived with her husband and two children burned down during the Almeda Fire. The family relocated to a suburban neighborhood in nearby Central Point, but haven’t been able to rebuild the kinds of strong community ties they had enjoyed in Talent. 

“My kids grew up in the Latino community [in Talent] where there were always kids on their bikes, people on the streets walking their dogs,” Corona said. “In our new community and our new neighborhood, we don’t have that. It’s like we don’t know anybody.” 

Even though Corona and her family were able to buy a house after losing their mobile home, she said three years later they’re still not fully recovered. 

“We’re listed [by the state of Oregon] as a recovered family because we purchased the house and relocated,” Corona said. “But for me, for my own mental health and for my kids’ mental health, I wouldn’t say we’re recovered. I’m still experiencing triggers from the fire.”

Corona said she is bothered by the smoke in the air much more after her experience with the Almeda Fire, especially around its September anniversary. 

Smoke is a constant reminder for wildfire survivors of their own harrowing experiences, and the potential for it to happen again. 

“That grieving and that mourning is re-triggered by smoke season because it’s evident in the very air we breathe that their experience is not only real, but it hasn’t ended,” said Tucker Teutsch, executive director of Firebrand Resiliency Collective, a nonprofit created to support the area’s recovery from the Almeda Fire.

The nonprofit runs a peer support group that provides a safe grief space for Almeda Fire survivors to share recovery resources and talk through problems they’re having in the fire’s aftermath. The group has met weekly since the 2020 fire.

When clean air is impossible to find

In the Methow Valley, a rural region in north-central Washington state, a coalition of community members has been supporting each other during smoke seasons since the 2013 Carlton Complex Fire, which destroyed 500 buildings.

The community coalition, called Clean Air Methow, spreads awareness about air quality safety. It also supports people struggling with the mental health toll of living with smoke. 

“With this mental health and wellness piece, what we often don’t explicitly acknowledge is the threat of what the oppressive, opaque, physical heaviness of being under this white smoke for a prolonged period of time is like,” said Elizabeth Walker, director of Clean Air Methow. 

“People kind of just say, ‘oh, it’s so bad, so smoky, I hate it,’” Walker said. “But when we ask people to actually give the words of their experience, they use ‘oppressive, heavy.’ They feel depressed.”

The number one clean air recommendation is for people to stay indoors, but this can contribute to feelings of social isolation when it’s smoky, according to Walker. Indoor air isn’t always cleaner than outdoor air, either. Older homes without modern windows, doors, ventilation and air conditioners can let in lots of smoke particles. 

“Make sure you’re indoors, but also make sure you’re indoors with a HEPA filter or an air filtration system,” said Erin Landguth, a University of Montana at Missoula scientist who researches the health effects of wildfire smoke exposure. Because buying and maintaining such systems are expensive, a “key difference” from cities is that rural residents may be less able to afford them.

Clean Air Methow has been advocating for “cleaner air shelters” in the Methow Valley to provide public spaces with better indoor air quality for community members to visit when it’s smoky out. They’ve also provided air purifiers to people living in homes that let lots of smoke in. 

Poor indoor air quality affects countless rural communities. 

At Southern Oregon University in Ashland, access to clean indoor air during smoke season is hard to come by. The college’s older buildings don’t have updated indoor ventilation, causing workers and students there to be exposed to toxic smoke particles.

“I’m lucky enough that the building I work in was built in, I think 2016 or something like that, and it has a great HVAC system,” said Willie Long, assistant director at the outdoor program and climbing center at Southern Oregon University. “I generally have pretty good air quality when I get to go to work, but it’s not like that for most people who work at SOU.” 

And when it’s smoky, colleges stay open. Southern Oregon University issued a policy in 2019 that states it will postpone all non-emergency strenuous activity, review filtration, and HVAC systems, and “encourage the use of N95 filtration masks or equivalent for personnel outdoors” when air quality exceeds the rate deemed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as hazardous for everyone. 

Trauma and anxiety

Heidi Honegger Rogers spent 25 years working as a family nurse practitioner before shifting her focus as an academic at the University of New Mexico researching the health impacts of weather disasters and environmental change. She’s an active member with the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments.  “Wildfire is a really intense and often traumatizing experience,” she said.

Though not everybody gets a diagnosis, Rogers said research shows that between a quarter and 60 percent of those directly affected by a wildfire will experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). About one in 10 people could still be affected a decade later, she said.

“Even after a trauma has dissipated and there’s no immediate emergency, the people stay in this agitated, super-alert state, which is characterized by anxiety,” Rogers said.

Smelling wildfire smoke or seeing another community burn can be triggering for those with PTSD, according to Rogers.

Smoke has become a trigger for Jocksana Corona, the former Talent resident who lost her mobile home in the Almeda Fire. She sought counseling after the fire to deal with her anxiety, in part because she didn’t want it interfering with her own work as a drug and alcohol counselor. 

“I knew my physical and emotional reactions to the smoke could interfere with my ability to help my own clients with their own struggles,” Corona said.

She went to a mental health counselor for six months who helped her process her anxiety. Corona encouraged her two children to seek counseling as well, but for her daughter, the experience wasn’t helpful. Most of the mental healthcare providers in the Rogue Valley are white and only speak English, which can be a barrier for non-white or non-English speaking patients. 

“I think that when it comes to mental health counseling for Latinos, it’s definitely lacking no matter whether you’re in Central Point or Medford, which are bigger towns,” Corona said. 

When Corona worked as a drug and alcohol counselor, she said she was one of just a handful of bilingual counselors in Jackson County – which includes Talent and Phoenix – and neighboring Josephine County. She had clients come from Roseburg, 100 miles away, seeking her bilingual services.

Trauma manifests itself differently in every person through experiences like sleep loss, chronic worry, and grief, Rogers said. “People can do okay for a little bit and then they can be triggered by something that goes into their brain and reminds them of this scary experience that they had.”

Stress, anxiety, and sleeplessness can manifest in declining physical health. “It degrades our immune response. We end up with more inflammation. We end up with more pain. We end up with more cardiovascular problems, high blood pressure,” Rogers said.

And for those not directly affected by wildfires, seeing infernos on the news and smelling smoke hundreds of miles away can serve as reminders that the climate is changing. Rogers said that can lead to senses of hopelessness and anger that corporations continue to pollute the atmosphere despite decades of warnings and mounting impacts.

One of the consequences of atmospheric pollution has been stark increases in the number of days each year when fire weather occurs across the U.S. and the world. Fire weather is marked by windy, hot, and dry conditions.

The region torched by the Almeda Fire sees three to six more days on average every year during the past decade when fire weather conditions are present, compared with four decades prior, analysis shows.

“We can have anxiety and fear and worry about any of those injustices that we’re seeing, or any of those losses that we’re seeing,” Rogers said.

Walker, the clean air educator with Clean Air Methow, said it can be helpful to remember that “smoke season doesn’t last forever” during smoky days.

“I think that living with wildfire smoke can become this really lovely reinforcement of mindfulness,” Walker said. “This is what it is right now, whether it’s good or bad, it’s going to change.” 

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline can be reached by dialing 988 and the Crisis Text Line can be reached by texting HOME to 741741.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Persistent wildfire smoke is eroding rural America’s mental health on Jan 7, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Claire Carlson, The Daily Yonder.

The post New Legislation Addresses Lack of Funding for Rural School Districts appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Shealeigh.

• A deluge of Israeli airstrikes today on a refugee camp near Gaza City has demolished apartment buildings, leaving craters where they once stood; at the same time, Israeli ground troops battled Hamas militants across northern Gaza.
• Jacob Lew confirmed as US Ambassador to Israel.
• The UN Human Rights Commission released a new report on the October 5 strike in the Ukrainian village of Hroza, urging Russia to acknowledge responsibility for the missile strike that killed over 50 civilians earlier this month.
• Documents released by a Maine sheriff’s office gave a newly detailed timeline of the warning signs and failed efforts to stop the gunman who killed 18 people and wounded 13 others at a bowling alley and bar last week.
• Fire officials are battling a wildfire in Southern California fueled by gusty Santa Ana winds that’s ripping through rural land southeast of Los Angeles.
• Federal and state fishery agencies are scrambling to save some of the last populations of Central Valley spring-run Chinook Salmon. In an urgent effort to help save their unique genetic heritage, juvenile salmon are being captured and transported to their new homes in a hatchery complex at U.C. Davis. The emergency action was triggered by extremely low numbers of salmon that returned to their creeks of origin to spawn this year.

Members of the Jamul Fire Dept., out of San Diego County, look for hot spots while fighting the Highland Fire Tuesday, Oct. 31, 2023, in Aguanga, Calif. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

The post Fire officials are battling a wildfire in Southern California fueled by gusty Santa Ana winds that’s ripping through rural land southeast of Los Angeles – Tuesday, October 31, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

A total of 650 homes were newly built between July and September in the mountainous northern province of Ryanggang. Some of the homes are individual one-story homes, but others are units in two or three-story apartment buildings.

State media, as usual, aired propaganda-laced reports showing happy residents moving in on Oct. 5, but their smiles quickly turned to frowns once the cameras were turned off, residents said.

Specifically, many of the apartments have thin, concrete walls that are cold in the winter, not brick-and-mud, which are thicker and provide better insulation. They also lack gardens for growing vegetables or places to keep animals, which is very common among rural families. 

Plus, none of the homes have running water.

“The newly built homes are an urban style that completely ignores the conditions of rural areas,” a resident of the province, who requested anonymity for personal safety, told RFA Korean. “There are many complaints from residents who have moved in.”

Simply plopping a three-story city-style apartment building next to a collective farm does very little for the people who have to live there, he said.

“A rural home must have a large garden and space to raise animals,” the resident said. “The new rural homes built on cooperative farms across the country are usually two or three stories … and have very little consideration for personal gardens or livestock farming space.”

Gift from the nation

It isn’t just anyone who can move into these new homes. Only men who finished their seven- to 10-year mandatory military service between 2019 and 2022 and who recently married were eligible to be awarded the home.

A shortage of homes in the rural areas means that many young people with families have had to shack up with their parents or siblings, so many jumped at the chance to move into the new ones, the resident said.

Some of them may be singing a different tune come winter, when temperatures can plunge to minus 36 degrees Celsius (minus 33 Fahrenheit), another resident told RFA. 

Winter chills

“The two-story and three-story apartments were built with cement, while the one-story houses were built with mud bricks and plastered with mud,” he said. “Those who received an apartment were not happy, while those who received a single-story house looked fortunate.”

To make matters worse, the concrete apartments have thin walls. It is normal for homes in the area to have exterior walls that are 50 centimeters (about 20 inches) thick, but the apartment walls are between 35 to 40 centimeters (around 14 to 16 inches) thick. 

“Apartment houses built with cement have a low thermal insulation effect, so they cannot withstand the cold in winter,” he said. “It is also inconvenient for gardening or raising domestic animals.”

In addition to the space and temperature problems, none of the homes have running water, the second resident said.

“There are water pipes and a toilet in every house, but there is no actual water network or water source,” the resident said, adding that there’s not even a plan to connect the homes to a water system at a later date. 

“So having water pipes and a toilet in the house does nothing,” he said. “The first thing the residents did after moving in was to get drinking water from the nearby stream.”

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Moon Sung Hui for RFA Korean.

Photograph Source: Defensie – Public Domain

Colombian president Gustavo Petro on October 3 attended a big meeting of mostly small farmers in El Tambo, in Cauca, where “the coca economy is the main way of life for thousands of peasants.” Colombia’s first progressive president ever was presenting his government’s National Drug Policy for 2023. Petro had insisted earlier that “war on drugs has failed.” He recently expressed support for “phased decriminalization.”

His government is evidently prioritizing the present initiative, which is part of its far-reaching program for social and political reforms, now stumbling due to strong right-wing political opposition. The drug plan attends to main features of Colombian’s longstanding social disaster. They include:  dispossession leading to consolidation of large land holdings, agricultural underdevelopment, migrations leading to precarious lives often in cities, widespread lethal violence; and great wealth accumulated by top-level distributers and their financial backers.

The government’s new plan promises much, especially to working people both in Colombia and abroad. Freed of the monopolization of illegal drug production and commercialization, rural areas might shift to diversified agricultural production and expanded support systems. Prospects for community-development programs might improve and those rural Colombians forced into cities might return.

By reducing that fraction of the domestic and international economy represented by drug production and marketing, the government would, in effect, be redistributing wealth, to a degree. And any success the new plan achieves in cutting back on drug commercialization might translate into reduced visibility abroad and, consequently, into lessened appeal to U.S. interventionists who have often justified military intrusions on that basis.

The plan calls for 27 “territorial spaces” in 16 departments and in Bogota, along with 51 “inter-institutional or bilateral technical working-groups.” Each one would hold three conferences with strategic allies, five with sectors drawn from the Joint Committee on Coordination and Follow-up. Other gatherings would involve women, young people, and prevention specialists.

Government spokespersons focused on the program’s two pillars. One of them, called “oxygenation,” supports those “territories, communities, people and ecosystems” adversely affected by drug-trafficking. It would support the transition to legal economies and reduce “vulnerabilities of regions and populations.” Measures would be taken that advance “environmental management and climate action toward … restoring regions” adversely affected by the narco-economy. The personal use of “psychoactive substances” will be dealt with on the basis of public health and human rights.

The other pillar, called “asphyxiation,” targets “the strategic nodes of the criminal system that generates violence” and “profits most from this illegal economy.”  The object would be to interfere with the “capacities and income” of the strongest drug-trafficking organizations and to do so so “systematically” and with consideration “of their complexity and relation with other economies both legal and illegal.”  Persons involved in production and trafficking would benefit from destigmatization and social justice.

The new plan has a slogan: “sewing life and burying narco-trafficking.” The aim is to remove 222,400 acres from coca and marihuana cultivation, reduce cocaine production by 43%, and block at least $55 billion in illegal financial gains. The plan would interfere with irregular banking and financial maneuvers and reduce both deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions.

Colombia’s illegal drug industry remains well entrenched, despite the drug war waged from 2000 on under the auspices of US Plan Colombia, a venture that absorbed billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. A United Nations report cites a 13% one-year increase in land given over to illegal crops, as of 2022. It takes note of a recent “summit meeting [in Bogota] of narcotrafficking capos from Albania, Poland, Spain and Colombia.”

The relentlessness of cocaine and marihuana production in Colombia may have led the U.S. government to recently stop monitoring the acreage of illegal crop cultivation. Indeed, after four decades of involvement, the U.S. government has abandoned its war against narco-trafficking in Colombia, according to analyst Aram Aharonian. Still, he reports, “weapons manufacturers” are benefiting, along with workers whose livelihood depends on narco-trafficking.

Petro’s new drug policy is significant mostly because it pursues objectives of the 2016 Peace Agreement which ended armed conflict between Colombia’s government and the FARC insurgency. Important parts of the new drug plan coincide with major provisions of that Agreement that were never implemented.

Agrarian reform matches with improving rural life generally. Solving the illicit drug problem was a goal of the Peace Agreement and now is the essence of Petro’s plan. The guarantee under the Peace Agreement of safety for former combatants never took root. The attacks against them are largely related to drug-trafficking, and now that will be dealt with.

Violence has been, and remains, pervasive. During just 13 months of the Petro government, assassins took the lives of 198 community and human-rights leaders and 43 former combatants.

A comprehensive report on the Petro government’s shepherding of  the peace process highlights the association of continuing violence with narco-trafficking. Indeed, “broad regions of the country” see persisting collusion of the police and military with paramilitaries and with “smaller narco-trafficking gangs and narco-trafficking structures.”

Affirmation of the Petro government’s new campaign against drug trafficking comes from the report in June of the United Nations Mission to Verify the Peace Agreement. It emphasizes“the importance of peace initiatives and of efforts being made to expand the presence of the state so that vulnerable communities may be protected, especially in rural areas.”

Much is at stake as a government undertakes to control and end the production and marketing of illegal drugs. According to the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America, “Problems associated with the production, trafficking, and consumption of drugs in Latin America affect the population’s quality of life, contribute to forms of social exclusion and institutional weakness, generate much insecurity and violence, and corrode governance in some countries.”

The post Colombia’s Campaign Against Drug-Trafficking Favors Peace Prospects and Rural Life  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by W. T. Whitney.

Civil society groups wanting to see an end to destructive logging practices by foreign companies in Papua New Guinea, say these companies are being given forest clearance authorities and then misusing them.

The PNG advocacy group, Act Now!, and Jubilee Australia said the forest clearance authorities (FCAs) are intended to allow limited pockets of forest to be cleared for agricultural or other use.

Eddie Tanago of Act Now! said a case study they conducted into West Sepik’s Wammy Rural Development Project, which is run by Malaysian logging company Global Elite Ltd, was meant to result in the planting of palm oil and rubber trees.

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES: Large scale logging continues in PNG despite Govt opposition
• READ MORE: Other PNG illegal logging reports

“Instead, it used it as a front. And we’ve seen hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of round logs being exported. Now, this particular operation has been going on for almost 10 years, and this company has sold more than US$31 million worth of round logs,” he said.

Tanago said there was no sign of any attempt to rehabilitate the land for other use.

ACT Now! said the Wammy project was also breaking other laws because the land was subject to the SABL (Special Agricultural Business Leases) Commission of Inquiry in 2013 and it was evident then that the landowners’ free, prior and informed consent had never been given, so there should not have been any logging on it.

Tanago said Wammy was just one of about 24 logging operations making use of an FCA licence, resulting in huge quantities of logs being exported.

“Together this activity exploiting FCAs covers about 61,800 hectares of forest, and that’s equivalent to about 11,000 football fields. So that’s really, really massive,” he said.

Act Now is “calling on the Forest Board and the PNG Forest Authority to extend the current moratorium on the new FCAs”.

“There was one that was announced in the beginning of this year that says that they were not going to issue any new FCAs. We want that to extend. We want logging in all the existing FCAs to be also suspended. And there should be a comprehensive public review of these projects.”

The PNG government has previously stated it wanted to end round log exports by 2025, but Act Now! points out that in the first six months of the current year exports have totalled 1.1 million cubic metres.

“The export log volumes now are currently very high. And the PNG Forest Authority is really failing to meet the reduction targets as set down in the medium term plan,” he sid.

“This is in breach of the targets that are set out by the government, plus, all the promises that we’ve seen, like the recent one bill made by Prime Minister [James] Marape when the French President was around.”

On the visit to PNG, President Emmanuel Macron and Marape visited a lookout in the Varirata National Park picnic area, renaming it the Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frederic Macron lookout point.

The Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) reports that the walk through the lush national park was underlined by the signing of a new environment initiative — backed by French and European Union financing — that will reward countries that preserve their rainforests.

Marape said the country’s rainforest was the third largest and undisturbed tropical rainforest in the world and preserving its integrity was of the utmost importance.

Act Now! would agree, saying PNG has to be looking to preserve the rainforest and reduce deforestation, but the current signs are not good.

RNZ Pacific contacted Global Elite Ltd for comment on this story but there was no response.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. The audio was first broadcast on Friday, 15 September 2023.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A joint project of PDA and RUBI, the Rural New Deal was designed as a non-partisan strategy, based upon the experience of rural development leaders, practitioners, and advocates from across the country.

According to PDA Executive Director, Alan Minsky, “Addressing the problems and concerns of rural America, isn’t just the right thing to do, it is essential for the health of our nation. Progressives have ignored rural for too long. The Rural New Deal will change that.”

The Rural New Dealw Deal is built around Ten Pillars of federal action, ranging from “Rebuild Farm, Forest and Food Economies” to “Dismantle Monopolies and Support Local Businesses” to “Invest in Rural Health Care”.

Each pillar includes five to eight specific recommendations for action, primarily though not exclusively at the federal level; all of which can be advocated for separately, as well as part of the compete RND platform.

Together they comprise an ambitious yet practical template for public action to rebuild diverse rural economies, strong communities, and a more ecologically resilient nation. The RND complements other recent efforts to shift federal rural policy, such as the Rural Democracy Initiatives “Rural Policy Action Report.”

“The extreme political divide in our country robs rural communities of the resources and opportunities they need, while making it nearly impossible to address the biggest problems we face as a nation,” says RUBI Director, Anthony Flaccavento.

“The Rural New Deal will help break that stalemate because it is both comprehensive and bottom-up in its approach, focusing on strategies that we know from experience will work.”

PDA has added the question “Do you support the Rural New Deal? Yes or No” to its 2024 candidate questionnaire for both the U.S. House and Senate (accompanied by a list of the ten pillars of the RND along with a link to the complete program).

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

In late July, I visited two settlements of the Landless Rural Workers (MST) on the outskirts of São Paulo (Brazil). Both settlements are named for brave women, the Brazilian lawmaker Marielle Franco – who was assassinated in 2018 – and Irmã Alberta – an Italian Catholic nun who died in 2018. The lands where the MST has built the Marielle Vive camp and the Irmã Alberta Land Commune were slated for a gated community with a golf course, and a garbage dump, respectively. Based on the social obligations for land use in the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, the MST mobilised landless workers to occupy these areas, build their own homes, schoolhouses and community kitchens, and grow organic food.

Each of these MST encampments are beacons of hope for ordinary people who are otherwise taught to feel redundant within the neo-colonial structures of contemporary capitalism. The MST has been under concerted attack in Brazil’s legislature, driven by the agenda of agro-business elites who want to prevent 500,000 families from building a tangible alternative for the working class and the peasantry. ‘When the elite see the land, they see money’, Wilson Lopes of the MST told me at Marielle Vive. ‘When we see the land,’ he said, ‘we see the people’s future’.

It is often impossible for people in large parts of the planet to imagine the future. Hunger rates rise, and those who can access food are often only able to eat unhealthily; family farmers, such as those at the MST settlements, provide over a third of the world’s food (more than 80% in value terms) and yet, they find it nearly impossible to access agricultural inputs, mostly water, and reasonable credit. The MST is the largest producer of organic rice in Latin America. Pressure from Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF and the World Bank) as well as from commercial banks and development agencies force countries to embrace ‘modernisation policies’ that are contrary to the facts. These ‘modernisation policies’, as we showed in dossier no. 66, were designed in the 1950s without an accurate assessment of global neo-colonial structures: they assumed that if countries borrowed money, strengthened their export sector for commodities, and imported finished goods from the West, then they would be able to ‘modernise’.

As we walked around the MST settlement, residents Cintia Zaparoli, Dieny Silva, and Raimunda de Jesus Santos told us about how the community struggled to access electricity and water, social goods which are not easily produced without large-scale interventions. For context, two billion people around the world have no easy access to safe drinking water. None of these social goods can be conjured out of thin air; they require complex institutions, and in our modern world, the most important of these institutions is the state. But most states are constrained from acting on their citizenry’s behalf due to external pressures that thwart economic policies which would benefit society over private capital and wealthy bondholders, who stand first in line to extract the immense social wealth produced in poorer nations.

None of these problems are new. For Latin America, the contemporary suffocation of state projects that aim to elevate people’s social conditions can be dated back to the Chapultepec Conference of 1945 held in Mexico City. Mexico’s Foreign Minister Ezequiel Padilla told the conference that it was ‘vital for the Americans to do more than produce raw materials and live in a state of semi-colonialism’. The view was that those living in the hemisphere must be allowed to use all tools necessary – including tariffs and subsidies – to build industries in the region. US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, was horrified by this attitude, telling the Venezuelan delegation that it had been ‘short-sighted … increasing tariffs and restricting trade by import and other controls after the first World War and in the early thirties’. The US put forward a resolution to get all Latin American states ‘to work for the elimination of economic nationalism in all its forms’, including the exercise of economic sovereignty against the advantages secured by multinational corporations. This agenda asserted that the first beneficiaries of a country’s resources should be US investors.

An important line of thinking, now known as ‘dependency theory’, developed in the aftermath of the Chapultepec Conference. It describes a neo-colonial setting where capitalist development in ‘periphery’ countries cannot take place since their economic output is structured to benefit ‘core’ countries, creating a situation that Andre Gunder Frank called ‘the development of underdevelopment’. Our dossier no. 67 – Dependency and Super-Exploitation: The Relationship Between Foreign Capital and Social Struggles in Latin America (August 2023) – uses the centenary of one of Brazil’s most important Marxist intellectuals, Ruy Mauro Marini (1932–1997), to outline a proper Marxist view from the Third World of this ‘dependency theory’ tradition for our current times. The text was developed by the Brazil office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, in collaboration with Professor Renata Couto Moreira from the Research Group on Marxist Studies of Dependency Theory in Latin America – Anatália de Melo Collective of the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES).

Our key assessment is to be found in these sentences:

The root of underdevelopment was not to be found in the industrial backwardness of each economy, but rather in the historical process and in the way that the countries of Latin America had been incorporated into the world market through colonisation by Europe, and then by the international relations to which those countries were subjected, which were perpetuated after their political independence by means of economic dependence on the dictates of the division of labour in global capitalism.

Countries in Latin America, but also in Africa and Asia, emerged in the post-World War II era as appendages of a world system that they were not able to define or control. As in the era of high colonialism, unprocessed raw materials were exported from these countries to earn valuable foreign exchange that was used to buy expensive finished products and energy. The uneven exchange that took place allowed for the almost permanent deterioration of the ‘terms of trade’, as Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer had shown in the 1940s and that has been reaffirmed in the 2000s. The structure of unevenness was premised not only on the terms of trade, as Prebisch and the more liberal scholars of dependency understood it, but importantly, in the global social relations of production.

In the zones of the South, wages are held down through a wide variety of mechanisms, as shown by an International Labour Organisation report from 2012. Reasons given for unequal wages across international borders are often racist, the argument being made that a worker in India, for example, does not have the same expectations of life as a worker in Germany. If workers in the South are paid less, this does not mean that they do not work hard (even if their productivity rates are lower due to less mechanisation and less scientific management of the workplace). The Marxist theory of dependency focused on this ‘super-exploitation’, pointing to the sub-contracted mechanisms of labour discipline that allow richer countries to maintain high moral standards while they rely on brutal work conditions that render social relations toxic in poorer nations. Our observation in the dossier is clear:

The super-exploitation of labour refers to the intensified exploitation of the workforce, resulting in an extraction of surplus value that exceeds the limits historically established in core countries. This becomes a fundamental feature of the capitalist system in underdeveloped economies, since foreign capital and local ruling classes benefit from workers’ low wages and precarious working conditions as well as the absence of labour rights, thus maximising their profits and capital accumulation. This contributes to the reproduction of these countries’ dependence and subordination as part of the international order.

The cycle of dependency, we argue, has to be broken by two simultaneous and necessary operations: the building of an industrial sector through active state intervention, and the building of strong working-class movements to challenge the social relations of production that rely upon the super-exploitation of labour in poorer regions.

In 1965, the year after the US-backed coup in Brazil and during the US-initiated coup in Indonesia, Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) published his monumental book, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. In this book, Nkrumah argued that the new nations that had come out of colonialism remained trapped in the neo-colonial structure of the world economy. Governments in places like Ghana that had been impoverished by colonialism had to beg their former colonizers and ‘a consortium of financial interests’ for credit to conduct the basic functions of government, let alone to advance the social needs of their population. The lenders, he argued, ‘have a habit of forcing would-be borrowers to submit to various offensive conditions, such as supplying information about their economies, submitting their policy and plans to review by the World Bank, and accepting agency supervision of their loans’. This intervention, deepened by the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programme, simply did not allow room for manoeuvre.

Neocolonialism was widely reviewed, including in a secret memorandum of 8 November 1965 by Richard Helms, Deputy Director of the US’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Helms took offence at the direct assault on imperialism in the book. In February 1966, Nkrumah was removed from office by a coup d’état encouraged by the US. That is the price to be paid for revealing the neo-colonial structure of the world and fighting for structural transformation. It is a price that the West wants to inflict on the people of Niger, who have decided that it is no longer beneficial to allow their wealth to be leeched away by the French, and for the US to have a major military footprint in their country. Can the people of Niger and the Sahel, in general, break the cycle of dependency that has created grief for over a hundred years?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

The post Revolution in Rural Greece appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Evaggelos Vallianatos.

Ji Feng was initially ordered to leave Beijing ahead of the 34th anniversary of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen massacre, along with dozens of other critics of the ruling Communist Party and former participants in the pro-democracy movement.

But unlike most of his peers, Ji hasn't been allowed to return to the city he calls home.

Instead, the authorities are forcing him to live in Guizhou, where he has his hukou, or household registration documentation, he told Radio Free Asia in a recent interview.

"They want to force me to go and live in a rural area, where my hometown is, in Tongzi county under the administration of Zunyi city," he said. "State security police in Zunyi have been very polite and nice to me, but I'm not allowed to go to [Guiyang], the provincial capital."

"They say there are [politically] sensitive people living here, but they won't even let me visit my uncle," said Ji, who chaired the Guizhou University Students' Autonomous Federation during the 1989 democracy movement in China.

Ji said the Guiyang authorities seemed to regard him as a "top priority.” He said he stayed at a friend's place in the city for a short time, but the state security police wouldn't leave him or his friend alone.

"They took my friend down to the police station, then had my friend bring them to his home," Ji said. "Then they called me down to the police station."

"There are about seven or eight state security police in Guiyang led by a single guy Chen Zhang, who was pretty scary," he said. "I told them to detain me, because they'd terrified my friend already."

"I didn't want my friend to face long-term harassment, threats and warnings just for meeting up with [me]," he said.

But police told Ji that while he was technically free to move around, anyone meeting with him would answer for the consequences.

Independent journalist Gao Yu said police had forced Ji out of his rented home in Songzhuang in Beijing's Tongzhou district.

"The police asked the landlord to cancel his lease, and he was told to move out quickly," Gao said. "The Beijing police told him he could go to Yanjiao [in neighboring Hebei province] and they would find an apartment for him."

"He didn't agree to that, but was forced to leave Beijing, and has been of no fixed abode since May," she said.

Gao said Ji's treatment is similar to that meted out to prominent rights lawyers Wang Quanzhang and Li Heping and their families.

She said police seem to want to isolate influential activists in remote locations, to minimize their ability to organize or meet up with like-minded people.

"The more remote a place they send you too, the less influence you will have," Gao said. 

Ji has so far refused to cave in and settle down in his hometown in Tongzi county.

Currently in the central province of Hunan, he plans to head for the southern city of Shenzhen next, and eventually to wind up back in Hebei province, not too far from Beijing.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gao Feng for RFA Mandarin.

Ji Feng was initially ordered to leave Beijing ahead of the 34th anniversary of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen massacre, along with dozens of other critics of the ruling Communist Party and former participants in the pro-democracy movement.

But unlike most of his peers, Ji hasn't been allowed to return to the city he calls home.

Instead, the authorities are forcing him to live in Guizhou, where he has his hukou, or household registration documentation, he told Radio Free Asia in a recent interview.

"They want to force me to go and live in a rural area, where my hometown is, in Tongzi county under the administration of Zunyi city," he said. "State security police in Zunyi have been very polite and nice to me, but I'm not allowed to go to [Guiyang], the provincial capital."

"They say there are [politically] sensitive people living here, but they won't even let me visit my uncle," said Ji, who chaired the Guizhou University Students' Autonomous Federation during the 1989 democracy movement in China.

Ji said the Guiyang authorities seemed to regard him as a "top priority.” He said he stayed at a friend's place in the city for a short time, but the state security police wouldn't leave him or his friend alone.

"They took my friend down to the police station, then had my friend bring them to his home," Ji said. "Then they called me down to the police station."

"There are about seven or eight state security police in Guiyang led by a single guy Chen Zhang, who was pretty scary," he said. "I told them to detain me, because they'd terrified my friend already."

"I didn't want my friend to face long-term harassment, threats and warnings just for meeting up with [me]," he said.

But police told Ji that while he was technically free to move around, anyone meeting with him would answer for the consequences.

Independent journalist Gao Yu said police had forced Ji out of his rented home in Songzhuang in Beijing's Tongzhou district.

"The police asked the landlord to cancel his lease, and he was told to move out quickly," Gao said. "The Beijing police told him he could go to Yanjiao [in neighboring Hebei province] and they would find an apartment for him."

"He didn't agree to that, but was forced to leave Beijing, and has been of no fixed abode since May," she said.

Gao said Ji's treatment is similar to that meted out to prominent rights lawyers Wang Quanzhang and Li Heping and their families.

She said police seem to want to isolate influential activists in remote locations, to minimize their ability to organize or meet up with like-minded people.

"The more remote a place they send you too, the less influence you will have," Gao said. 

Ji has so far refused to cave in and settle down in his hometown in Tongzi county.

Currently in the central province of Hunan, he plans to head for the southern city of Shenzhen next, and eventually to wind up back in Hebei province, not too far from Beijing.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gao Feng for RFA Mandarin.

In a video clip filmed from a truck driving from the northern city of Tangshan to Malanzhuang township in the northern province of Hebei and posted by several Twitter users, the truck slows as a tall figure blocks a road, before an older man with a cell phone gestures briefly indicating the price to pass through the unofficial “toll booth.”

“What’s that?” the truck driver says. “Talk to me! One yuan?”

A woman then holds out a phone with a QR code on it, as the driver says: “So we take WeChat Pay here, do we?”

While Radio Free Asia was unable to verify the video independently, commentators said the phenomenon isn’t new, but has likely seen a resurgence amid growing economic hardship in the wake of the three-year restrictions of Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy.

Further along the same route, the truck pulls up again, to address an elderly woman in a burgundy blouse.

“What is it? Money you want?” the driver calls. The woman nods.

“How much? Five yuan?”

The process is repeated further down the highway, with two older women approaching his cab, waving cell phones and asking for payments of 10 yuan and 5 yuan respectively.

‘Things are going from order to disorder’

Jiangsu-based current affairs commentator and former migrant worker Zhang Jianping said unofficial “tolls” are more commonly found in central and western China, where people are generally poorer.

“These farmers only make 107 yuan a month ... What can you buy with 100 yuan?” Zhang said. “At the same time, retired officials get tens of thousands of yuan a month, while staying in hospital for an entire year, at a cost of several million.”

“Meanwhile, these farmers who’ve spent their lives knee-deep in the soil with their backs bent in the service of their country, what are they supposed to do?”

Last October, ruling Chinese Communist Party censors removed a film about the struggles of a poverty-stricken farming couple from streaming sites ahead of the party congress, prompting a public outcry on social media.

“Return to Dust,” a love story about a couple who marry and eke out a living for themselves from farming despite being rejected by their own communities, has a bleak ending that is out of keeping with government “public opinion” policy, which views media and cultural products as a tool to advance “positive stories” about China.

China declared in November 2020 that it had eliminated extreme poverty, claiming success for one of Xi’s key policy goals ahead of the party centenary the following year.

Yet as government-backed employment schemes have focused on getting younger people to seek jobs in cities, elderly people in rural areas have been left to eke a meager living from government subsidies, without the younger generation around to help, and without enough money for decent medical care.

Many are deciding such a life isn’t worth living any more.

New research published in July 2022 and cited by state news agency Xinhua showed that the suicide rate among elderly people in rural areas has risen fivefold over the last two decades

U.S.-based commentator Ma Ju said he first ran into unofficial toll booths in the 1990s, when China’s economic boom had just gotten started.

The fact that they are making a comeback suggests people’s incomes are falling again.

“People don’t have enough for their lives to be sustainable,” Ma said. “The income of officials at the lowest level is limited, and there isn't much effort to maintain social order.”

“This sort of thing will happen more and more in future,” he said. “Things are going from order to disorder.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Matt Reed.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

In a video clip filmed from a truck driving from the northern city of Tangshan to Malanzhuang township in the northern province of Hebei and posted by several Twitter users, the truck slows as a tall figure blocks a road, before an older man with a cell phone gestures briefly indicating the price to pass through the unofficial “toll booth.”

“What’s that?” the truck driver says. “Talk to me! One yuan?”

A woman then holds out a phone with a QR code on it, as the driver says: “So we take WeChat Pay here, do we?”

While Radio Free Asia was unable to verify the video independently, commentators said the phenomenon isn’t new, but has likely seen a resurgence amid growing economic hardship in the wake of the three-year restrictions of Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy.

Further along the same route, the truck pulls up again, to address an elderly woman in a burgundy blouse.

“What is it? Money you want?” the driver calls. The woman nods.

“How much? Five yuan?”

The process is repeated further down the highway, with two older women approaching his cab, waving cell phones and asking for payments of 10 yuan and 5 yuan respectively.

‘Things are going from order to disorder’

Jiangsu-based current affairs commentator and former migrant worker Zhang Jianping said unofficial “tolls” are more commonly found in central and western China, where people are generally poorer.

“These farmers only make 107 yuan a month ... What can you buy with 100 yuan?” Zhang said. “At the same time, retired officials get tens of thousands of yuan a month, while staying in hospital for an entire year, at a cost of several million.”

“Meanwhile, these farmers who’ve spent their lives knee-deep in the soil with their backs bent in the service of their country, what are they supposed to do?”

Last October, ruling Chinese Communist Party censors removed a film about the struggles of a poverty-stricken farming couple from streaming sites ahead of the party congress, prompting a public outcry on social media.

“Return to Dust,” a love story about a couple who marry and eke out a living for themselves from farming despite being rejected by their own communities, has a bleak ending that is out of keeping with government “public opinion” policy, which views media and cultural products as a tool to advance “positive stories” about China.

China declared in November 2020 that it had eliminated extreme poverty, claiming success for one of Xi’s key policy goals ahead of the party centenary the following year.

Yet as government-backed employment schemes have focused on getting younger people to seek jobs in cities, elderly people in rural areas have been left to eke a meager living from government subsidies, without the younger generation around to help, and without enough money for decent medical care.

Many are deciding such a life isn’t worth living any more.

New research published in July 2022 and cited by state news agency Xinhua showed that the suicide rate among elderly people in rural areas has risen fivefold over the last two decades

U.S.-based commentator Ma Ju said he first ran into unofficial toll booths in the 1990s, when China’s economic boom had just gotten started.

The fact that they are making a comeback suggests people’s incomes are falling again.

“People don’t have enough for their lives to be sustainable,” Ma said. “The income of officials at the lowest level is limited, and there isn't much effort to maintain social order.”

“This sort of thing will happen more and more in future,” he said. “Things are going from order to disorder.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Matt Reed.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

In a video clip filmed from a truck driving from the northern city of Tangshan to Malanzhuang township in the northern province of Hebei and posted by several Twitter users, the truck slows as a tall figure blocks a road, before an older man with a cell phone gestures briefly indicating the price to pass through the unofficial “toll booth.”

“What’s that?” the truck driver says. “Talk to me! One yuan?”

A woman then holds out a phone with a QR code on it, as the driver says: “So we take WeChat Pay here, do we?”

While Radio Free Asia was unable to verify the video independently, commentators said the phenomenon isn’t new, but has likely seen a resurgence amid growing economic hardship in the wake of the three-year restrictions of Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy.

Further along the same route, the truck pulls up again, to address an elderly woman in a burgundy blouse.

“What is it? Money you want?” the driver calls. The woman nods.

“How much? Five yuan?”

The process is repeated further down the highway, with two older women approaching his cab, waving cell phones and asking for payments of 10 yuan and 5 yuan respectively.

‘Things are going from order to disorder’

Jiangsu-based current affairs commentator and former migrant worker Zhang Jianping said unofficial “tolls” are more commonly found in central and western China, where people are generally poorer.

“These farmers only make 107 yuan a month ... What can you buy with 100 yuan?” Zhang said. “At the same time, retired officials get tens of thousands of yuan a month, while staying in hospital for an entire year, at a cost of several million.”

“Meanwhile, these farmers who’ve spent their lives knee-deep in the soil with their backs bent in the service of their country, what are they supposed to do?”

Last October, ruling Chinese Communist Party censors removed a film about the struggles of a poverty-stricken farming couple from streaming sites ahead of the party congress, prompting a public outcry on social media.

“Return to Dust,” a love story about a couple who marry and eke out a living for themselves from farming despite being rejected by their own communities, has a bleak ending that is out of keeping with government “public opinion” policy, which views media and cultural products as a tool to advance “positive stories” about China.

China declared in November 2020 that it had eliminated extreme poverty, claiming success for one of Xi’s key policy goals ahead of the party centenary the following year.

Yet as government-backed employment schemes have focused on getting younger people to seek jobs in cities, elderly people in rural areas have been left to eke a meager living from government subsidies, without the younger generation around to help, and without enough money for decent medical care.

Many are deciding such a life isn’t worth living any more.

New research published in July 2022 and cited by state news agency Xinhua showed that the suicide rate among elderly people in rural areas has risen fivefold over the last two decades

U.S.-based commentator Ma Ju said he first ran into unofficial toll booths in the 1990s, when China’s economic boom had just gotten started.

The fact that they are making a comeback suggests people’s incomes are falling again.

“People don’t have enough for their lives to be sustainable,” Ma said. “The income of officials at the lowest level is limited, and there isn't much effort to maintain social order.”

“This sort of thing will happen more and more in future,” he said. “Things are going from order to disorder.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Matt Reed.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

In a video clip filmed from a truck driving from the northern city of Tangshan to Malanzhuang township in the northern province of Hebei and posted by several Twitter users, the truck slows as a tall figure blocks a road, before an older man with a cell phone gestures briefly indicating the price to pass through the unofficial “toll booth.”

“What’s that?” the truck driver says. “Talk to me! One yuan?”

A woman then holds out a phone with a QR code on it, as the driver says: “So we take WeChat Pay here, do we?”

While Radio Free Asia was unable to verify the video independently, commentators said the phenomenon isn’t new, but has likely seen a resurgence amid growing economic hardship in the wake of the three-year restrictions of Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy.

Further along the same route, the truck pulls up again, to address an elderly woman in a burgundy blouse.

“What is it? Money you want?” the driver calls. The woman nods.

“How much? Five yuan?”

The process is repeated further down the highway, with two older women approaching his cab, waving cell phones and asking for payments of 10 yuan and 5 yuan respectively.

‘Things are going from order to disorder’

Jiangsu-based current affairs commentator and former migrant worker Zhang Jianping said unofficial “tolls” are more commonly found in central and western China, where people are generally poorer.

“These farmers only make 107 yuan a month ... What can you buy with 100 yuan?” Zhang said. “At the same time, retired officials get tens of thousands of yuan a month, while staying in hospital for an entire year, at a cost of several million.”

“Meanwhile, these farmers who’ve spent their lives knee-deep in the soil with their backs bent in the service of their country, what are they supposed to do?”

Last October, ruling Chinese Communist Party censors removed a film about the struggles of a poverty-stricken farming couple from streaming sites ahead of the party congress, prompting a public outcry on social media.

“Return to Dust,” a love story about a couple who marry and eke out a living for themselves from farming despite being rejected by their own communities, has a bleak ending that is out of keeping with government “public opinion” policy, which views media and cultural products as a tool to advance “positive stories” about China.

China declared in November 2020 that it had eliminated extreme poverty, claiming success for one of Xi’s key policy goals ahead of the party centenary the following year.

Yet as government-backed employment schemes have focused on getting younger people to seek jobs in cities, elderly people in rural areas have been left to eke a meager living from government subsidies, without the younger generation around to help, and without enough money for decent medical care.

Many are deciding such a life isn’t worth living any more.

New research published in July 2022 and cited by state news agency Xinhua showed that the suicide rate among elderly people in rural areas has risen fivefold over the last two decades

U.S.-based commentator Ma Ju said he first ran into unofficial toll booths in the 1990s, when China’s economic boom had just gotten started.

The fact that they are making a comeback suggests people’s incomes are falling again.

“People don’t have enough for their lives to be sustainable,” Ma said. “The income of officials at the lowest level is limited, and there isn't much effort to maintain social order.”

“This sort of thing will happen more and more in future,” he said. “Things are going from order to disorder.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Matt Reed.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

In a video clip filmed from a truck driving from the northern city of Tangshan to Malanzhuang township in the northern province of Hebei and posted by several Twitter users, the truck slows as a tall figure blocks a road, before an older man with a cell phone gestures briefly indicating the price to pass through the unofficial “toll booth.”

“What’s that?” the truck driver says. “Talk to me! One yuan?”

A woman then holds out a phone with a QR code on it, as the driver says: “So we take WeChat Pay here, do we?”

While Radio Free Asia was unable to verify the video independently, commentators said the phenomenon isn’t new, but has likely seen a resurgence amid growing economic hardship in the wake of the three-year restrictions of Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy.

Further along the same route, the truck pulls up again, to address an elderly woman in a burgundy blouse.

“What is it? Money you want?” the driver calls. The woman nods.

“How much? Five yuan?”

The process is repeated further down the highway, with two older women approaching his cab, waving cell phones and asking for payments of 10 yuan and 5 yuan respectively.

‘Things are going from order to disorder’

Jiangsu-based current affairs commentator and former migrant worker Zhang Jianping said unofficial “tolls” are more commonly found in central and western China, where people are generally poorer.

“These farmers only make 107 yuan a month ... What can you buy with 100 yuan?” Zhang said. “At the same time, retired officials get tens of thousands of yuan a month, while staying in hospital for an entire year, at a cost of several million.”

“Meanwhile, these farmers who’ve spent their lives knee-deep in the soil with their backs bent in the service of their country, what are they supposed to do?”

Last October, ruling Chinese Communist Party censors removed a film about the struggles of a poverty-stricken farming couple from streaming sites ahead of the party congress, prompting a public outcry on social media.

“Return to Dust,” a love story about a couple who marry and eke out a living for themselves from farming despite being rejected by their own communities, has a bleak ending that is out of keeping with government “public opinion” policy, which views media and cultural products as a tool to advance “positive stories” about China.

China declared in November 2020 that it had eliminated extreme poverty, claiming success for one of Xi’s key policy goals ahead of the party centenary the following year.

Yet as government-backed employment schemes have focused on getting younger people to seek jobs in cities, elderly people in rural areas have been left to eke a meager living from government subsidies, without the younger generation around to help, and without enough money for decent medical care.

Many are deciding such a life isn’t worth living any more.

New research published in July 2022 and cited by state news agency Xinhua showed that the suicide rate among elderly people in rural areas has risen fivefold over the last two decades

U.S.-based commentator Ma Ju said he first ran into unofficial toll booths in the 1990s, when China’s economic boom had just gotten started.

The fact that they are making a comeback suggests people’s incomes are falling again.

“People don’t have enough for their lives to be sustainable,” Ma said. “The income of officials at the lowest level is limited, and there isn't much effort to maintain social order.”

“This sort of thing will happen more and more in future,” he said. “Things are going from order to disorder.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Matt Reed.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

America’s rural electric cooperatives, the member-owned and -operated entities that bring power to 42 million people and cover more than half the country, will soon get their biggest jolt of federal funding since the New Deal law that created them in the first place.

And the terms for applying for a piece of the $10.7 billion in grants and loans are pretty wide-open — as long as cutting greenhouse gas emissions and making energy more affordable and accessible takes center stage. These are the parameters of two federal programs created by last year’s Inflation Reduction Act that were officially unveiled last month.

Beyond serving the most sparsely populated parts of the country, co-ops also serve 92 percent of U.S. counties designated as being in persistent poverty.

Electric co-ops have also tended to have a more coal-heavy generation mix than the investor-owned and municipal utilities that serve more densely populated parts of the country, although they have collectively reduced carbon emissions by 23 percent from 2005 to 2020. Many of the more than 800 distribution co-ops that directly serve power to customers rely on power from larger generation and transmission co-ops that tend to lack the access to debt and capital that would allow them to shutter aging power plants.

But electric co-ops can also act more flexibly than large investor-owned utilities in seeking out clean energy alternatives and providing their customers with efficiency funding, grid-responsive appliances and access to other forms of distributed energy. The new programs are meant to provide an ​“exciting and transformative opportunity for co-ops and their local communities, particularly as we look toward a future that depends on electricity to power more of the economy,” Jim Matheson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, said in a statement.

Keeping pace in the new clean energy era

The New Empowering Rural America (New ERA) program and Powering Affordable Clean Energy (PACE) program are administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s the same agency originally tasked by the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 to expand electricity delivery from less than 10 percent of rural America during the Great Depression to almost every acre of the country today.

The New ERA program has $9.7 billion available in grants or loans of up to 10 percent of that total per applicant, with direct grants limited to 25 percent of a project’s total cost. The PACE program has $1 billion available for low-interest loans, with up to 60 percent of the loan amounts forgivable by the federal government.

The PACE program guidance allows loans for wind power, solar power, hydropower, biomass or geothermal projects, as well as for energy storage projects. The New ERA program can fund the purchase of or investment in renewable or carbon-free energy, batteries and other forms of energy storage, carbon capture or clean hydrogen production or energy efficiency improvements to generation and transmission systems.

To pick winning applications, the USDA will rely on a few core metrics, Chris McLean, assistant administrator of USDA’s Rural Utilities Service, said as part of a presentation of the programs during an April webinar hosted by nonprofit group Grid Forward. First, ​“they’ll be scored in terms of their greenhouse gas reductions,” and second, ​“affordability is going to be a key factor.”

But within those criteria, co-ops have ​“a lot of flexibility,” he said. ​“You can pick from any number of these technologies; you can pick from any number of these financial options.” 

And importantly, rural electric co-ops will be able to ​“stack” these benefits on top of the tax credits for clean energy, energy storage, hydrogen and other energy investments subject to federal investment and production tax credits, Bryce Yonker, Grid Forward’s executive director and CEO, told Canary Media. Before the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, nontaxable entities like co-ops weren’t able to access these tax credits. But under the ​“direct-pay” provisions of the law, co-ops can now receive the value of those tax credits as payments from the U.S. Treasury Department.

“I think it’s an especially exciting opportunity to get funds to our more rural and smaller operators across the country,” Yonker said. ​“They have a hard time competing when they have to go head-to-head against the big players, which have the expertise and the staff members to put together competitive solicitations.”

McLean laid out a number of options for how co-ops can put the new funding to work.

One is to build their own clean energy generation resources, a tack taken by a number of co-ops such as Kit Carson Electric Cooperative in north-central New Mexico, which has met its goal of supplying 100 percent of its daytime power from distributed and community solar.

Another is to sign power-purchase agreements to buy clean energy from other sources, such as Guzman Energy, a Colorado-based company that’s helping co-ops in Colorado and New Mexico switch from coal-fired power to lower-cost clean energy.

Other co-ops are pursuing ​“behind-the-meter demand response systems,” Bryan Bacon, financial and economic branch chief of the Rural Utilities Service’s Grid Security Division, said during the April webinar. One example of that is Colorado-based Holy Cross Energy, which is deploying technology to manage rooftop solar, batteries and electric vehicle chargers as part of its goal of supplying 100 percent carbon-free electricity to its members by 2030.

Technologies that can improve the efficiency of cooperative-operated transmission systems are also eligible for funding, Bacon said. Cooperatives happen to operate high-voltage power lines in some of the most wind- and solar-rich parts of the country, making them prospective targets for technologies such as dynamic line rating systems or advanced conductors that can expand their capacity to deliver that power to population centers where it can be sold.

Beyond the new USDA programs, Yonker highlighted other sources of federal funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed in 2021 that electric co-ops could seek out, such as $13 billion in grid modernization grants.

But as exciting as those additional opportunities may be, he pointed out that they lack one advantage the new USDA programs have.

“In the case of USDA, because it’s such a big pot of money, and because there are only co-ops eligible — nothing’s guaranteed, but these stakeholders have a good chance of getting these funds,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rural electricity is getting its biggest boost since FDR — here’s how on Jun 10, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jeff St. John, Canary Media.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture will begin to administer two loan and grant programs worth nearly $11 billion to boost clean energy systems in rural areas, administration officials said Tuesday.

Congress approved the federal spending — $9.7 billion for a grant and loan program the department is calling the New Empowering Rural America program, or New ERA, and $1 billion for a Powering Affordable Clean Energy program that will provide partly forgivable loans — in the energy, health, and taxes law Democrats passed last summer. 

The funding “continues an ongoing effort to ensure that rural America is a full participant in this clean energy economy,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told reporters on a teleconference in advance of the announcement.

Rural areas can have more difficulty than more urban ones in attracting private sector investment, White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi said. The programs are intended to allow those rural areas to take advantage of an industry-wide trend to invest in clean energy production.

“There’s a favorable wind blowing here,” he said. “This allows rural communities to put up a sail.”

The programs are meant to put rural electric cooperatives on equal footing with larger privately owned companies that have already put major funding into clean energy deployment, Vilsack said.

The programs represent the largest single funding effort for rural electrification since President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Rural Electrification Act in 1936, a USDA press release said.

The money is meant not only to address the climate impacts of fossil fuel energy and reduce home energy costs, but to act as an economic engine for rural areas, Zaidi said.

Zaidi cited a Stateline analysis that showed seven of the top 10 largest gross domestic product growth increases between 2019 and 2021 had significant wind farm production.

“This is a proven driver of economic growth on the ground,” Zaidi said. “We want more folks to be able to tap into that opportunity. We’re seeing this not only translates into lower energy costs, but, to places that had been shut down, turning back on as sources of economic opportunity.”

Rural electric cooperatives are eligible for the New ERA program. Up to 25 percent of the funding in that program can be in the form of direct grants. Utilities can use the money to build renewable energy systems, zero-emission systems, and carbon capture facilities, according to the department release.

The climate law allows “the stacking of benefits,” Vilsack said. That means utilities that receive loans and grants through the program can also use the clean energy tax credits that were approved in the law, he said.

The USDA will begin to accept initial applications for funding on July 31. Applicants are expected to write more detailed proposals for funding after the USDA accepts their initial applications.

The PACE program provides loans to renewable energy developers and electric service providers “to help finance large-scale solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, hydropower projects and energy storage in support of renewable energy systems,” the release said. 

The program is targeted to “vulnerable, disadvantaged, Tribal and energy communities,” the release said. It’s in line with a Biden administration goal to give at least 40 percent of the overall benefits of certain federal spending to disadvantaged communities.

The USDA can forgive up to 40 percent of most of the loans in the program. Up to 60 percent of loans to applicants in some U.S. territories and tribal communities can be forgiven.

Initial applications for that program will open June 30.

This story is a product of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity, and was shared with permission through the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rural electric co-ops to get nearly $11 billion in federal funds for clean energy grants, loans on May 21, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jacob Fischler, States Newsroom.

The 18-month inquiry found the Alabama Department of Public Health and the Lowndes County Health Department acted with neglect and discrimination toward the county’s residents by not only denying them access to basic sanitation, but imposing fines and even liens against them while ignoring the grave health impacts the situation created.

“Today starts a new chapter for Black residents of Lowndes County, Alabama who have endured health dangers, indignities and racial injustice for far too long,” Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said Thursday in a statement announcing the agreement. “Our work in Lowndes County should send a strong message regarding our firm commitment to advancing environmental justice, promoting accountability and confronting the array of barriers that deny Black communities and communities of color access to clean air, clean water and equitable infrastructure across our nation.”

Residents of this county in central Alabama have long lived without basic sanitation services and have watched raw sewage from failing septic tanks flow into their yards. Catherine Coleman Flowers, founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice and a 2017 Grist 50 honoree, brought the issue to public attention in her book, Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret. It describes shocking scenes of raw sewage on the ground, overflowing toilets, and repeated calls in vain to the city to pump effluent from yards. In a county where almost 1 in 3 residents live in poverty, very few could do much about the problem, leaving almost half the county’s homes without access to wastewater infrastructure. A study in 2017 found that rare intestinal parasites persisted in over 30 percent of the Lowndes county residents surveyed, and all of them were Black.

After years of community organizing led by Flowers and others, the federal Justice and Health and Human Services departments launched an investigation in November, 2021. They focused on Title IV of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits recipients of federal funding from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin in federally funded programs and activities. They also considered the Affordable Care Act, which explicitly prohibits the exclusion of any individual from services provided by a public health program. 

The investigation found that not only did the Alabama Department of Public Health fail to provide basic sanitation to the residents of Lowndes County, but the Lowndes County Health Department actively enforced sanitation laws. It often levied charges on residents who had no control over the sanitary conditions in their community, and who often could not afford upgrades. 

According to the agreement, the state health department is working alongside federal agencies to correct the situation. The Department of Justice has ordered the agency to immediately stop prosecuting Lowndes County residents for sanitation law violations, and take meaningful steps to assess the county’s wastewater needs, develop a plan to address them, and collaborate with the residents to do so. The state health department must provide people with “critical health and safety information” and work with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to assess health risks to the population, and develop a plan within a year to improve public health in the county. Federal agencies may reopen the investigation if officials feel the agreements are not being followed.

“The work is just getting started,” Flowers said. “We have, over the years, been working to shed light on the problem. Now we’re at the point where we’re working on a solution. I think that [state health officials] will cooperate, because now the nation is watching.”

The federal investigation and resulting agreement mark the first time an environmental justice inquiry has fallen under the Civil Rights Act. Justice Department officials indicated that it would not be the last — something Flowers applauded.

 “There are numerous communities across the United States, especially rural communities, that have these issues,” she said. “So yes, we hope that this will be an example for others to follow. Or people can decide to not wait for the Justice Department to get involved, but to go to work on solutions. “

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A landmark investigation brings environmental justice to rural Alabama on May 8, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Katie Myers.

Volunteer firefighter Jim Emery grew emotional as he spoke to the crowd at an anti-solar development town hall meeting in his northeast Texas community. Emery, who worked for decades at the nearby coal power plant before it closed in 2018, didn’t worry then about pollution from the plant.

But now, the fear of storage batteries catching on fire at a solar facility grip the 67-year-old.

“I’ve been in the fire department since we started in ’76, and this scares me more than anything I’ve ever been involved with,” Emery told roughly 50 people gathered in a local coffee shop called Penelope’s in Mount Vernon, the county seat. “We need to stop it. I don’t know how we can. But we don’t need solar power in Franklin County at all.”

People cheered and whistled. Someone shouted, “Amen!”

In this pastoral county of about 11,000 residents roughly 100 miles east of Dallas, people have become alarmed by the number of solar companies interested in their abundant open land — and more importantly, their access to crucial electricity transmission lines. At least one solar project is being developed in the county, and community organizers are bracing for more.

They have a list of reasons for fighting solar development: The projects can require cutting down trees, scraping away grasses and blocking wildlife with fences. The community argues the long-term impacts of acres of solar panels on people and the environment have not been well studied.

Residents say they’re frustrated that Texas has few regulations for renewable energy. They are banding together with people in other rural Texas communities to push the Legislature to pass Senate Bill 624, which would require the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to review environmental impacts for wind and solar projects, require renewable power developers to hold public meetings and require facilities to be built at least 100 feet from property lines and 200 feet from homes.

Over the past decade, solar and wind development has boomed in Texas, spurred by federal incentives and previous renewable-friendly state policies that lawmakers are now undoing. Texas leads the country in wind production and is near the top for solar.

Opponents have argued that wind and solar projects are bad for the ecosystem — wind turbines can kill birds and bats, and solar farms require installing infrastructure on large areas of land.

Supporters point to the benefits: Local and state governments get tax dollars, companies hire a handful of people to run the facilities and the cheap power they produce doesn’t require burning fossil fuels, which drives climate change.

They say the legislation puts unfair burdens on the wind and solar industry — other kinds of development don’t automatically have to host a community meeting or undergo the same level of environmental review before breaking ground. They say it poses one of the biggest threats to their ability to operate in Texas, jeopardizing billions of dollars of investment. And it’s just one of a slew of bills legislators are considering that could potentially harm the industry.

“We are just another case of private landowners deciding what to do with their property,” said Monty Humble, managing director at High Road Clean Energy LLC, which develops solar projects. “And in that sense we’re no different than somebody deciding to develop a trailer park, or any other land use that the neighbors might not particularly like.”

They have rallied to fight the bill, primarily authored by state Sens. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, and Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, which passed out of committee April 13.

“Why does the bill only apply to renewable energy projects that use minimal water, have no air emissions and provide vital revenues in long-term lease payments to ranchers and farmers to enhance the productive use of rural land?” John Davis, a former state representative and a board member for Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation, asked during a hearing before the Senate Business and Commerce Committee. “It doesn’t make sense, unless of course it’s to punish renewables.”

Residents in Franklin County still don’t want solar panels next to their land. David Truesdale, a 64-year-old retired federal law enforcement agent, moved from Dallas to a 57-acre property in the area during the COVID-19 pandemic and now runs a nonprofit with his wife and leads the local group of solar opponents.

Both husband and wife meditate. They’re pescatarians. Their daughter drives a Tesla.

Truesdale said the state was doing nothing to protect them from what he considers an unsafe type of development that’s destroying a beautiful, peaceful landscape of cattle farms and prairie.

“We don’t think it’s appropriate to destroy the earth in order to save the earth,” Truesdale said. “It makes no sense to us.”

A statewide fight 

The fight against renewables is playing out in other Texas communities.

In neighboring Hopkins County, Michael Pickens, grandson of the late oil and gas magnate T. Boone Pickens, is part of an effort to incorporate the town of Dike so it can at least charge power line fees or road fees to the solar companies if it can’t stop the projects from coming.

A self-described “tree-hugger,” the 41-year-old Pickens wore a “save the vaquita” T-shirt — a reference to an endangered marine mammal — at the Franklin County town hall meeting. He described what they were experiencing as renewable energy company Engie started building a 250-megawatt solar farm on land with post oak trees and wetlands that attracted bald eagles.

Pickens claimed the project destroyed the wetlands and polluted the water so badly that it smelled like a rotting carcass. Residents have filed lawsuits to challenge the local tax breaks the company received and complained to state environmental regulators and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, claiming that sediment was flowing off the construction site.

“It’s just gorgeous,” Pickens said, showing an image of his mom’s land. “Why would you ever clear-cut and decimate that for solar? It’s about the money.”

In a statement, Engie said the 1,850-acre site was largely cow pasture where the majority of trees had already been cleared and there were no active bird nests. The company said it assessed where wetlands were located and put runoff and erosion control measures in place. Many people supported the site, and the company planned to continue to reach out to the community, the statement said.

“We take our environmental compliance seriously and have worked through various agency processes and with our contractors to design and construct the project,” the company said. “While we have taken many proactive measures and continue to monitor and work diligently on compliance, when there is an issue raised, we want to evaluate and address it promptly, regardless of the source of a complaint.”

On the Texas-Mexico border, a local group supported a bill during the 2021 legislative session aimed at blocking Chinese developers from building a wind farm near the pristine Devils River around Del Rio and connecting it to the electrical grid. But the victory was short-lived; a Spanish company is acquiring the rights to develop the site, according to the Devils River Conservancy.

And near El Campo, about an hour’s drive southwest of Houston, Cricia Ryan is fighting wind and solar development that she sees as a threat to the agricultural way of life that her family depends on to make a living. Ryan’s dad is a crop duster; her mom helps run the business.

Ryan, 33, has lived in the area since she was 10 years old and has watched as farmland has been cleared to make way for solar panels and wind turbines.

“I truly don’t think people realize what’s taking place until it’s too late,” Ryan said as she climbed into her vehicle to give a tour of the new development over dirt roads. “Especially if you live in the city, and you just don’t think about it. It’s kind of like ‘out of sight, out of mind.’”

Ryan, who drove to Austin to speak in support of SB 624, said she’s concerned about the hazards turbines pose for crop duster pilots. And she’s tired of seeing roads torn up by construction traffic (signs on some local roads now prohibit construction trucks).

Environmental advocates agree it’s preferable to avoid undeveloped land and put solar and wind projects on land that has already been cleared. Some companies have tried to address that concern voluntarily. For example, clean energy company Ørsted announced plans to buy nearly 1,000 acres of sensitive prairie land as part of a northeast Texas project in Lamar County and donate it to The Nature Conservancy, then build a solar project on another 3,900 acres.

“Every development has decisions that are being made, and we would love for them to think about developing more sustainably, but it takes a willingness on the part of the business,” said Suzanne Scott, state director for the Texas chapter of The Nature Conservancy.

“What can we do?”

At the Franklin County town hall meeting, organizers served tamales, and B. F. Hicks, the 71-year-old town lawyer and a seventh-generation area resident, greeted everyone.

Hicks moved home to Franklin County from Dallas soon after law school. He’s a naturalist who gets excited about spotting an eastern kingbird or a scissor-tailed flycatcher on a barbed wire fence. He lives in a restored church, maintains a 922-acre swath of flower-covered prairie that he owns and displays a slew of environmental and historic preservation awards in his office.

“We’re lobbying really hard in Austin right now,” Hicks told a county commissioner at the meeting.

Anguished residents argued renewable energy was getting away with too much. Ron Barker recalled squirrel hunting in sun-streaked woods that he fears will be chopped down by solar companies. Kathy Boren, who retired from the local Lowe’s distribution center, said a battery facility that will store solar energy is being built near her home, and she felt nobody was concerned about her property rights.

“What can we do?” asked someone in the crowd.

They’ve tried fighting the solar projects on multiple fronts. More than 1,100 locals signed a petition against any solar projects in the county. County commissioners voted to impose a 180-day moratorium on commercial solar development — even though the county attorney warned them that they didn’t have the authority to limit what a company could do on leased land.

The commissioners later rescinded the moratorium, and the county attorney asked the state attorney general’s office to review whether the county had the power to adopt and enforce it.

Some residents took the fight to the local school board last year as it weighed whether to give tax breaks to two solar developers, including Enel Green Power, which is developing a 210-megawatt solar installation and the 70-megawatt battery storage site that worried Boren. The company named the project “Stockyard.”

At an Oct. 6 school board meeting, the residents asked the board to turn the deals down while Zach Precopia, a development manager for Enel, tried to assuage their concerns. Precopia said the company typically reached out to the local fire department to prepare them for the unlikely possibility of electrical fires and used low-risk and tough-to-break panels; residents had voiced concerns about trace metals from the panels contaminating soil and water.

The company in other cases had developed agreements with neighbors, sometimes offering small monetary payments in recognition that they have to live next to an industrial site.

Precopia, who grew up about two hours away in Sherman, said when he negotiates leases with landowners, he assures them their property will be protected and promises that the company will remove its equipment and return the land in healthy condition when it eventually shuts down a solar project — the company said it expects to operate on the land for about 40 years.

The company has leased around 1,900 acres for the project from the family of Cody West, 48, who said in an interview that the money his family will earn from leasing two properties to Enel has allowed him to quit his work as a project manager building wind turbines and move home to work on the family’s ranch.

“This affords us another opportunity to have the money to keep ranching, go buy another place, expand our herd,” West said. “Ultimately, it was a pretty easy decision to go ahead and take the offer. … Everybody can continue doing what they like to do, what they love to do.”

On Nov. 14, the school board rejected the tax breaks, saying the financial benefits of adding a new company to the strapped school tax rolls didn’t “offset the intangible costs to the relationship between the district and the community.”

Enel is moving ahead with the project.

Disclosure: Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation, the Devils River Conservancy, the Texas Parks And Wildlife Department and The Nature Conservancy have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Correction, April 19, 2023 at 1:20 p.m.: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the size of the property on which clean energy company Ørsted plans to build solar panels in Lamar County. The industrial part of project is planned for 3,900 acres, not 5,000 acres.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Solar and wind companies are coming to rural Texas. These residents are trying to keep them out. on Apr 29, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Emily Foxhall, The Texas Tribune.

The Ministry of Agriculture announced this week it will roll out a pilot scheme to "standardize" the transfer of rural property rights, as well as "strengthening supervision and management" over the use of rural land in China, which is typically leased to farmers on 30-year "household responsibility" contracts, with the ownership remaining with the government.

The move comes after the administration of supreme party leader Xi Jinping made it easier in 2016 for farmers to be bought out of household responsibility leases, to encourage farmers to relocate to urban areas to reduce rural poverty. 

China declared in November 2020 that it had eliminated extreme poverty, with analysts attributing the change in statistics to the mass relocation of younger migrant workers to cities, under strong official encouragement.

Under the new land rules, officials are expected to "give full play to government leadership" via controversial "agricultural management" enforcement officials, who critics fear will send the country back to Mao-era collective farming and micromanagement of people's daily lives.

Analysts and farmers said that the main point of the additional controls is the tightening of state control over the supply of grain and to facilitate the transfer of rural land away from farmers if needed.

Food security

The move comes amid an ongoing government campaign to "stabilize the grain supply" and other moves to ensure food security, including revamping moribund Mao-era food co-ops and ordering the construction of state-run canteens.

The rules insist on "disciplined transactions" including supervision of contract-signing and "certification," and could pave the way for the mass reallocation of farmland in future, analysts said.

A rural resident of the eastern province of Shandong who gave only the surname Zhang for fear of reprisals said he had recently found that farmers in his hometown now need a permit to farm land already leased to them.

"I went back home and the neighbors told me that you now need a permit to till the land," Zhang said.

He blamed the "national food crisis" for the move, saying it effectively means that rural residents can no longer have friends and neighbors take care of their land when they migrate into the cities to look for work.

"When my relatives and friends would go to look for work, they would have others till their land for them, with no need for any kind of contract," Zhang said. "Then, they could just pick it up again immediately if their work ended and they went back to live in the countryside."

"That's no longer possible due to the serious nature of the national food crisis," he said.

Another major land reform

Financial commentator Cai Shenkun said the scope of the pilot scheme is unprecedented.

"This is another major land reform [following on from 2016], and it's worth observing whether the next step will be to roll it out to all rural land governed by household responsibility contracts," Cai said.

"Given the involvement of the agricultural management officials who are now empowered to enforce the law, I think it has something to do with the next step, which will be the confiscation and reallocation of land," he said.

Agricultural management officials are among a slew of local officials empowered in a July 2021 directive to enforce laws and regulations without the involvement of the police.

There are growing signs of unease around the new breed of rural "enforcer."

Netease and Sina Weibo's news channels reported on Wednesday that a team of agricultural management officials seized two truck-loads of live pigs and sent the animals for slaughter on the grounds that quarantine regulations hadn't been followed.

After that, the farmers complained that they had received no money for the carcases, and that the trucks hadn't been returned to them.

Photos of the equipment issued to the "enforcers" showed first-aid kits, mobile phone signal jammers and stab-proof vests.

‘A new devil’

The reports prompted comments complaining of intrusive management of farmers' lives, and asking if the agricultural enforcers were "a new devil for the New Era," in a satirical reference to one of supreme leader Xi Jinping's ideological buzzwords.

A farmer from the southwestern province of Sichuan who gave only the surname Sen said the enforcers were also active in his part of the country.

"They are bringing in this policy now, which is evil," Sen said. "The agricultural management teams have so much power." 

"They are descending on the countryside and making life hell for ordinary people with all this rectification."

Cai's perception of the new rural management teams was similar to Sen's and to comments seen online by Radio Free Asia, and he likened them to the widely hated urban management enforcement teams, or chengguan, who are often filmed beating up street vendors in the name of civic pride.

"Now they are sending these so-called agricultural management teams into countless households, and into the fields," he said.

"They came into being, like the urban management officials before them, because when farmers aren't cooperating, local township and village officials don't want to show their faces, or get involved in beating people up or demolishing stuff," he said. 

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

"Due to the need to create a civilized environment, the planting of climbing vegetables like beans or melons and squashes in front and backyards is strictly forbidden," a notice placed in a village near the northern city of Xian dated April 1 said.

"That includes cucumbers, tomatoes, loofahs, pumpkins, zucchini, etc," said the notice, which caused an outcry after it was photographed and posted by a social media user from the village. 

"The village committee will be sending personnel to carry out spot checks, and to destroy any [forbidden crops]," said the notice, which appeared around the time that most farmers and gardeners are planting beans and melons in China, just after the April 5 grave-sweeping festival of Qingming.

Within hours, the story had become one of the hottest searches on the Twitter-like platform Sina Weibo, Sina's news site reported – and prompted a rapid climbdown from the committee in charge of Han village in Huyi, a semi-rural suburb of Xian.

"The village cadres issued such inappropriate proposals because of the urgency to fulfill their personal management targets," Sina's news report said.

"The sub-district [in charge of Han village] has asked the village committee to correct the inappropriate proposals and explain to the villagers in a timely manner," it said. "It has also criticized and educated the relevant village officials."

New breed of enforcer?

By April 15, the Ministry of Agriculture had weighed in with a lengthy question-and-answer video warning its enforcement officials that "nothing can be done without legal authorization."

It wasn’t clear if similar notices were posted in other areas, but the fact that the agricultural ministry issued an explainer and warned local officials not to overstep suggests it fears the issue could be widespread.

The public uproar comes amid simmering public anger over the violent enforcement of lockdowns, mass quarantine orders and brutal culling of family pets during three years of COVID-19 restrictions.

The report also sparked concern online that a new breed of Chinese law enforcement official – the agricultural management officer – would soon be following the example of their widely-hated city-dwelling counterparts, the chengguan, who are frequently filmed beating up street hawkers in the name of "urban management."

According to late former Communist Party aide Bao Tong, the chengguan form part of ever-widening state control of every aspect of people's lives under the authoritarian model of government seen in China since the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.

Those controls are implemented on the ground by a bewildering array of different enforcement personnel, ranging from retired volunteers in red armbands, through chengguan to traffic cops, riot police, public security officers, People’s Armed Police and plainclothes state security police, as well as the PPE-clad "white guard" enforcers of the zero-COVID policy, which ended in December.

‘Layers of party control’

The proliferation hasn't slowed under supreme party leader Xi Jinping, whose administration recently conferred law-enforcement powers on neighborhood committees and set up local militias to boost "stability maintenance," a system of law enforcement aimed at forestalling dissent and nipping protest in the bud.

“The [1989] massacre paved the way for countless layers of party control, from national government to the urban police, or chengguan, and the auxiliary police, to ordinary people and dissidents governed as ‘special households,’" and for the mantra ‘Follow the party and prosper: oppose it and die’ to be encoded into the minds of all Chinese citizens," Bao wrote in a 2022 commentary for RFA's Mandarin Service.

Specific guidelines

According to the Ministry of Agriculture video, the job of agricultural management officers is to "stabilize grain supply" as part of a nationwide and comprehensive food security policy in 2023, which comes as Beijing revamps a Mao-era system of food distribution that analysts said could provide a network of emergency logistics in the event of war.

They should also concern themselves with which seeds, pesticides, veterinary drugs, feed and agricultural machinery are used by farmers, as well as enforcing animal and plant quarantine and disease prevention measures, and managing fisheries in China's lakes and rivers, it said.

"The duty and mission of the agricultural law enforcement team is mainly to crack down on illegal activities like counterfeit and shoddy seeds, pesticides, and veterinary drugs," the video said.

"Prohibiting the planting of melons and other vegetables in people's gardens don't fall within [their remit]," it said, calling for "more tolerant and prudent" approach to "minor violations by small farmers, farmers' cooperatives and small agribusinesses."

Mao-era nightmare

Current affairs commentator Zhang Jianping, who grew up in the countryside, said local agricultural officials were notorious during the Mao era for micro-managing every aspect of people's lives.

"They would clamp down on any farmer who planted a few vegetables or kept chickens," Zhang said. "Now it seems from reports in various places as if they're up to their old tricks again, oppressing ordinary people."

Zhengzhou-based rights activist Jia Lingmin said the danger of such law enforcement teams was that they could easily start to operate as unaccountable, “kangaroo” courts.

"This kind of punishment of ordinary people is just like a kangaroo court, which is a serious violation of the Constitution," Jia said. 

Recent official reports from the central province of Hubei showed that authorities had fined hundreds of people recently for burning stubble in the fields, in a province that already boasts more than 5,000 agricultural law enforcement officers.

Hubei resident Mao Shanchun said the Chinese government is constantly trying to tighten up its control over people's lives.

"[Where there is no independent judiciary], new institutions will emerge in a bid to strengthen social control," Mao said. "But it's ordinary people who pay the price."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

But while more than 70 per cent of all those affected in food crises are farmers or working in the fishing industry, only 4 per cent of emergency assistance targets their needs.

The Director of Emergencies of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Rein Paulsen, has been talking to Michele Zaccheo about ways to improve emergency responses, and put resources in the hands of farmers themselves.

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Michele Zaccheo.

The post Rural Students Are Suffering Without the Specialized Help of Teachers appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

The post Urban Bias in Weather Forecasting Results in Disaster for Rural Kentucky appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

Rural areas in the U.S. have faced a decline in hospitals that provide obstetric services for years, and the fate of one hospital in northern Idaho suggests that abortion bans could worsen the trend.

As The Washington Post reported reported Tuesday, Bonner General Health in Sandpoint, Idaho has been forced to announce the impending closure of its labor and delivery department, citing staffing issues as well as the state's punitive abortion ban—one of the strictest in the nation—and threats from state Republicans to make the law even more stringent.

The state's ban criminalizes abortion cases in almost all cases and threatens doctors who provide care with felony charges, suspension or termination of their medical license, and up to five years in prison. It includes potential exceptions for people whose pregnancies result from rape or incest and people who doctors determine face life-threatening pregnancy complications—but as Common Dreams has reported, such exceptions have led medical providers to withhold care until a patient is sufficiently ill, placing them in danger.

The threat of prosecution and pressure to withhold medical care from people who need it has contributed to the hospital's staffing shortage, said Bonner General Health in a statement late last week.

"Idaho's political and legal climate does pose as a barrier specific to recruitment and retention for OB-GYNs."

"Highly respected, talented physicians are leaving. Recruiting replacements will be extraordinarily difficult," said the hospital. "In addition, the Idaho Legislature continues to introduce and pass bills that criminalize physicians for medical care nationally recognized as the standard of care. Consequences for Idaho physicians providing the standard of care may include civil litigation and criminal prosecution, leading to jail time or fines."

Idaho Republicans have proposed classifying abortion as "murder from the moment of fertilization" and have called for bans that extend to people whose pregnancies result from incest and rape.

"Idaho's political and legal climate does pose as a barrier specific to recruitment and retention for OB-GYNs," hospital spokesperson Erin Binnall told the Post.

Patients in Sandpoint will now have to travel to Coeur d'Alene, about 45 miles south, to deliver their babies. The city now has the northernmost labor and delivery department in the state, and people living near the state's northern border may have to travel two hours to reach the hospitals there.

Bonner General Health announced its decision days after the podcast "This American Life" featured an interview with an obstetrician who has worked for several years at Bonner General Health but has considered leaving the state since Idaho's ban went into effect last June, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturnedRoe v. Wade.

"I was looking at social media and somebody was talking about a person who is completing their OB-GYN residency and was looking to come to the Pacific Northwest," said Dr. Amelia Huntsberger. "And I'm like, hey, there's all sorts of openings in Idaho. And then I'm laughing out loud because I'm like, who is going to be finishing their residency training and being like, I definitely want to go to the state with the super strict abortion laws that criminalize healthcare?"

The Journal of the American Medical Associationpublished a report in 2018 showing that a lack of obstetric care in rural hospitals is associated with a rise in preterm births and more people giving birth in facilities where medical staff lack the proper training to assist with labor and delivery, such as emergency departments. High rates of maternal mortality are also associated with "maternity care deserts," which include nearly half of rural U.S. counties, according to the Commonwealth Fund.

Nearly 90 rural obstetrics units closed their doors between 2015 and 2019, with hospitals citing financial losses associated with high numbers of patients who use Medicaid as well as difficulty in recruiting and retaining doctors.

"This will be the beginning of a trend, I fear," said behavioral scientist Caroline Orr Bueno of Bonner General Health's decision. "We already have a maternal mortality crisis in the U.S.—we're the only country in the developed world where maternal mortality rates are increasing—and abortion bans are going to make it worse."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

The Department of Energy hopes to address these longstanding challenges by dedicating $315 million toward a sweeping effort to help rural and tribal communities nationwide modernize their electrical grids, invest in renewables, and help residents increase the energy efficiency of their homes. 

The initiative, announced last week, is part of the Energy Improvements in Remote and Rural Areas program. The funding is part of a broader effort to allocate more than $1 billion over the next five years to support energy projects in communities of less than 10,000 people. The goal is to promote climate resilience and address rural energy cost burden — defined as the percentage of a household’s income allocated toward energy bills each month — through “replicable energy projects that lower energy costs, improve energy access/resilience, and/or reduce environmental harm.” 

“There isn’t one ideal project – we’re casting a wide net,” a senior Energy Department official told Grist. “[Rural] communities are not one-size-fits-all.” 

Applications for the funds are due in June, and must include a “community benefits plan” outlining how the project will ensure worker safety, fair wages, and diversity in hiring.

Advocates for rural and tribal communities say the funding does more than facilitate the green energy transition – it facilitates safe, affordable housing. According to a 2018 study by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, rural households experience a higher energy cost burden than urban households. About a quarter of them occupy poorly insulated mobile homes. Electricity disconnects are high, and storms can knock out power for days. According to the study, even simple household improvements would save the average resident hundreds of dollars every year.  Another study found that renewable energy costs consumers less than coal, with 99 percent of coal-fired generation plants costing more to run than wind and solar facilities.

Small utilities and advocates for energy equity say federal investment is sorely needed, particularly in cash-poor, rural areas. Some communities already have pioneered exactly the types of projects encouraged by the federal program announced last week, and hope to secure the funds to launch more. 

The Ouachita Electric Cooperative in Arkansas is part of the country’s sprawling rural electric co-op system in which ratepayers are both members and owners of their utility and play a role in decision-making. Based in the small town of Camden,  100 miles south of Little Rock, Ouachita Electric recently embraced renewable energy to better serve its members, who often struggle to make ends meet.

“Our median income is $31,000 – blue collar factory workers,” said co-op membership manager Leslie Holloway. Some members face an energy burden 30 percent above the national average, she said. Many lack the capital to invest in their homes, most of which are over 30 years old and in dire need of upgrades. Although loans for energy efficiency upgrades are available to homeowners, they’re often out of reach for rural, working class renters. To address that, Ouachita secured an $8 million federal grant to kickstart an energy savings program and build a solar array. It used the funding to help improve members’ homes with duct sealing, insulation, and other energy-saving upgrades. Ultimately, the program allowed the cooperative to reduce rates 3.4 percent and saved Ouachita Electric enough money to recoup almost all of its investment.

Rural utilities and power companies that are working toward a green transition say half the work lies in overcoming decades of economic disadvantage and disinvestment. Brett Isaac, the founder and executive chairman of public benefit renewable energy corporation Navajo Power, says public assistance in funding the energy transition is essential for communities that have long been left behind.    

“The investment from the various different opportunities under the Biden administration, from Infrastructure to the Inflation Reduction Act….these are all monumental, because they’re actually putting quantifiable investments into certain areas that have never really experienced them,”  said Isaac, a 2022 Grist 50 honoree. “We don’t have the institutions that created our economies, like we’re not in control of those things.” 

Since its beginning, uranium, coal, and other minerals have been mined on Navajo territory, but nevertheless left most of the people living there in poverty. That era may be passing.  The Navajo Generating Station, formerly the largest coal-fired power plant in the country, powered down in 2019, leaving its massive service area in need of both new jobs and new energy resources. Almost 30 percent of the reservation’s homes still don’t have electricity.  But Navajo Power is currently in Phase I of a plan to build utility-scale solar projects on tribal land and install panels on residents’ homes.  

In Kentucky, Chris Woolery, a residential energy coordinator with the Mountain Association, can’t wait to help rural power companies and electric cooperatives access the federal funding. Advocates throughout the state have been laying the groundwork for renewable transition for many years. The Mountain Association, for example, provides loans for small solar projects and works with other groups to push for state policies friendlier to small-scale solar development.  “What we are saying is, we know that we have the tools to address our problems. We pioneered them ourselves,” Woolery said.

A big barrier, he says, could be legislative – for instance, state lawmakers are trying to pass a bill banning utilities from accepting federal funds to shut down coal plants. Meanwhile, the outdated grid in central Kentucky left thousands without power for days after a windstorm last month. Woolery said energy efficiency and distributed renewables could increase grid resiliency during extreme weather – a necessity in remote communities where roads can be damaged and emergency services can be hours away. Ultimately, he said, providing energy equity and reliability is a matter of not just savings, but survival – a promise that no one should ever have to choose between their energy bill and their next meal. 

“We’re working towards a vision in which access to energy is just a human right,” Woolery said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rural America gets $315 million for cleaner, more affordable energy on Mar 16, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Katie Myers.

Papua New Guinea’s Service Improvement Programme worth more than K1 billion (NZ$440 million) has become a major cash cow for “irresponsible” leaders, says the monitoring agency.

In the past decade, the Provincial and District Services Improvement Programme has delivered much but has not achieved what it set out to deliver — vital government services like schools, health centres, roads and bridges, jetties to the rural population.

Its overseer, the Department of Implementation and Rural Development has now become concerned at the apparent abuse and misuse of public funds by political leaders and their district administration.

The DIRD now reports that a large amount of money has been spent on “ghost projects” which are not physically completed on the ground and cannot be monitored due to financial constraints among others.

Many are half complete health centres or abandoned school classrooms or teachers houses, says DIRD secretary Aihi Vaki.

“Not all of it has been properly acquitted kina by kina. Even the amount of money allocated by the Treasury Department to each district is unknown to the DIRD.”

However, Finance Secretary Dr Ken Ngangan has defended the transfer of the country’s service improvement budgets to the provinces and the remittance of funds by Finance Department as a policy initiative approved by Cabinet.

‘A misunderstanding’
“There is a misunderstanding of the legal framework for budget and expenditure management under which all public and statutory bodies operate,” he said.

“As reported, NEC Decision 240/2018 provided for DIRD oversight of PSIP/DSIP funds management and monitoring.

“Accordingly, the NEC decision was effectively put into effect through the 2019 National Budget process, in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution, PFMA and Appropriations Act, with PSIP/DSIP funds allocated to DIRD in the National Budget for management and monitoring.”

However, a concerned Vaki has termed it as an “open secret” known to the leaders and their district public servants.

He said the DSIP and PSIP acquittals were compounded by lack of surveillance and monitoring by his department staff due to lack of funding from the National Government despite request after request.

He said there were many issues encountered, some of which were reports of proposed ghost projects paid out and finding their way into the acquittal papers to DIRD.

District Services Improvement Project (DSIP) grants amounts to K960 million a year while provincial (PSIP) grants are K220 million a year. The total bill in a year disbursed by Treasury to MPs is K1.18 billion.

“Due to the increase in districts last year, this year’s allocation will increase to a whopping K1.239 billion,” Vaki said.

Concerns amplified
His concerns were amplified in 2021 by now sidelined Immigration Minister Bryan Kramer on multi-million kina projects in rural districts.

Kramer had said that projects were designed, pre-fabricated, and allegedly constructed according to the acquittals but in reality, there was nothing to show for on the ground.

Kramer, who was then Justice Minister, had also claimed that billions of kina were also lost to undelivered state contracts every year and investigations into some of these incomplete projects were made by the State Audit and Recovery Taskforce (SART) initiated by the Department of Justice and Attorney-General working with nine other state agencies with more than K25 million already recovered.

The current status of the SART since then is not known. Nor how much more they may have been able to identify or recover following the last update provided by Kramer.

These were examples of abuse and misuse on a national level, but on the DDA level, it was alleged that millions may have been squandered through unscrupulous and dubious project deals in rural areas.

Vaki was forthright in his revelation, adding that while 60 percent of MPs had made an attempt to acquit their funding, 40 percent had never provided evidence of how they had spent public money in their districts.

Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Officials have warned of a fresh surge in coronavirus cases brought to rural areas by city residents traveling back home to welcome in the Year of the Rabbit, state broadcaster CGTN reported.

"We are extremely worried about the potential COVID-19 surge in rural areas as people are visiting homes after three years of strict measures that prevented people from going home," Jiao Yahui, head of the Bureau of Medical Administration under the National Health Commission, told journalists on Jan. 3.

Villages in general lack adequate medical care or preventive measures, with many rural counties only served by a single hospital, two at the most, news site Guancha.cn quoted Wuhan University sociologist Lv Dewen as saying.

But some rural doctors told Radio Free Asia that the rural COVID-19 wave, which started last month in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, is already well under way.

Already stretched

A doctor working at the Gaoping township clinic in the central province of Hunan, serving a local population of some 40,000, said the clinic is already stretched with an influx of coronavirus cases.

"I haven't had a day off in two weeks," said the doctor, who declined to be named for fear of reprisals. "If we get sick with a fever, we carry on working if we're not too bad."

She said the clinic was in the process of hiring two more doctors, but that the process was being drawn out further by the requirement that they undergo political vetting before starting work. 

She added that the majority of the clinic's current COVID patients are elderly people with underlying conditions.

"We have reached our limit, and if there is a new wave coming, all we can do is to rely on the support of those higher up, and [refer patients] to a higher-level hospital," the doctor said.

A doctor working at a clinic in nearby Zhenzi township said they are already at full capacity.

"We have more than 30 medical staff here, and they are already operating at full capacity, or beyond it," said the doctor, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals. "This started as soon as the zero-COVID restrictions were lifted."

Antivirals shortage

Meanwhile, a doctor at the Tonggu township clinic on the outskirts of Chongqing, which serves a local population of around 17,000 people, said there is currently an acute shortage of antivirals in their district.

"COVID-19 is a viral disease, so we need antivirals, but all we can do at our hospital here is to offer infusions of ribavirin," he said. "No other antivirals [are available] apart from a few orally administered antiviral solutions."

A September 2020 report in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents found that ribavirin did little to help COVID patients clear the virus, nor was it linked to improved mortality rates. 

The Tonggu clinic currently employs just two doctors and two nurses, and they are struggling to give adequate care to critically ill patients.

"If they need emergency care, all we can do is call 120 [the emergency number] to get help from nearby towns like Wujia or Renyi," the doctor said. "They have slightly better staff levels and equipment, and we would transfer those patients there, or to a district-level [government-run] People's Hospital."

She said local pharmacies currently have little or no supplies of montmorillonite powder, believed to be helpful in treating the diarrhea experienced by patients infected with the XBB Omicron subvariant.

According to a Jan. 2 report in the China Securities Journal, many rural doctors have scant experience of treating the coronavirus, as they have been entirely occupied delivering mass testing and quarantine requirements under the zero-COVID policy for the past three years.

Clearly unprepared

A doctor working in the southern city of Guangzhou said hospitals and clinics at township level are clearly unprepared for the COVID-19 wave.

"I have two relatives who came to the city to seek treatment, because there was no way to treat their symptoms, such as fever, and [local clinics] didn't even have intravenous antipyretics," the doctor, who asked to remain anonymous, told Radio Free Asia.

He said there is a lack of data on infections in rural areas, but he would guess that more than half the population of rural Guangdong, of which Guangzhou is the provincial capital, has already been infected with COVID-19.

Tang Lilong, a farmer from Pingshun county in the northern province of Shanxi, was reluctant to discuss the pandemic when contacted by Radio Free Asia on Wednesday, saying only "it doesn't matter." Asked if the government had taken any measures to mitigate transmission in the community, he said "no."

Wang Zhaoqing, a farmer from Laixi in the eastern province of Shandong said many of his family have already gotten COVID-19, but hadn't taken medicine for it. He also said there were no disease prevention measures in place.

A veteran healthcare worker who gave the pseudonym Lu Qing said he is very concerned about the rural wave, because local governments and healthcare providers have run out of cash.

"Governments at all levels, local and central, have run out of money," Lu said. "They actually don't have the resources to care [for people] or manage [the current wave]," he said. 

He said the fact that rural residents brushed off questions about the pandemic didn't mean they weren't suffering.

"Actually, people living in rural parts of China are actually in a more desperate situation [than city-dwellers]," Lu said. "They are more bearish generally about life and death, and figure that they'll die when they die. They don't typically make a fuss."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Wang Yun for RFA Mandarin.

Many rural schools face a “dire shortage” of teachers. At the start of the 2021-2022 school year, for example, the state of Colorado had 380 openings for educators in its public schools serving rural communities, and more than half of these remained unfilled by the end of the school year, Dobo reported. Consequently, schools had no choice but to hire staff that had not received proper training to become school teachers, especially in specialized courses.

Dobo’s report profiled one striking exception to this trend: Robert Mitchell, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, who originally made a four-hour commute to Campo, a rural Colorado town with 103 residents, to study the needs of rural students. Shortly after Mitchell began his research in Campo’s school district––which has just one building and fewer than fifty students––the superintendent asked him if he could help teach Campo’s students, because the school could not hire teachers, especially ones qualified to teach advanced classes such pre-calculus. Mitchell agreed and now, five years later, he continues to make the four-hour drive to Campo to teach college-credit classes, help students complete college applications, and discuss their future endeavors.

The challenges faced by students in rural have not been well covered by corporate news media. But there are some notable exceptions. In September 2021, for example, a special issue of the New York Times Magazine focused on education included an in-depth article titled “The Tragedy of America’s Rural Schools.” The Times’ report focused on how public schools in rural communities often failed to adequately prepare students due to outdated textbooks, lack of qualified teachers, and dilapidated facilities. But, overall, the issue of rural education remains underreported by the establishment press.

Source: Nichole Dobo, “Waiting for the Traveling Teacher: Remote Rural Schools Need More Hands-on Help,” Hechinger Report, September 20, 2022.

Student Researchers: Hannah Finn, Laney Imbrogna, Kelsey Rowe, and Stephen Shaw (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Faculty Evaluator: Allison Butler (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

The post Rural Area Students Face Barriers to Higher Education appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

Dominique Harrison, the JCPES study’s author, told Asher-Schapiro and Sherfinski in October 2021 that “despite constant conversations about rural access to broadband in the US, most of it is focused on white rural residents.” Harrison’s study found that, across 152 counties in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, Black Americans were ten times more likely not to have internet access than white Americans in those same counties. Specifically, 38 percent of Black Americans in those counties reported that they lacked home internet access, while only 23 percent of white Americans in those same areas said the same.

The lack of infrastructure and financial resources available to these areas contribute to this digital divide. Hazel Levy of the University of Florida told the Hechinger Report that there were “actually access allocation issues. . . . That’s not simply these access gaps that just naturally happen, that access is actually allocated.”

Salman’s Hechinger Report article outlined the historical background to these current access gaps. As she reminded readers, Depression-era federal housing policies denied mortgage guarantees to majority-Black neighborhoods by classifying them as “high risk,” a practice known as redlining. Researchers from the University of Florida who examined the links between disparities in current broadband access and past discriminatory federal housing policies found that “despite internet service providers reporting similar technological availability across neighborhoods, access to broadband in the home generally decreases in tandem with historic neighborhood risk classification.”

Inadequate access to broadband can have dire consequences. Nicol Turner Lee, the director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, explained to Asher-Schapiro and Sherfinski that lack of broadband access “undermines everything [for the underserved], from those seeking jobs to those seeking public benefits to healthcare access—it’s the whole nine yards.”

Asher-Schapiro and Sherfinski noted that President Biden’s infrastructure bill earmarks $65 billion for expanding broadband access, making it “the biggest broadband investment in our history to close the digital divide,” according to Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO). On November 15, 2021, Biden signed the $1 trillion infrastructure bill into law.

Although many news outlets have reported on America’s digital divide, corporate news sources, such as the New York Times and CNN, have not addressed the deep historical roots of disparities in broadband access. The Chicago Sun-Times published a May 17, 2022, commentary about digital redlining of Chicago’s Black neighborhoods. But no big corporate news organizations appear to have covered digital redlining affecting Black communities in the South, even as it relates to the infrastructure bill.

Avi Asher-Schapiro and David Sherfinski, “‘Digital Divide’ Hits Rural Black Americans Hardest,” Thomson Reuters Foundation News, October 6, 2021.

Javeria Salman, “Racial Segregation Is One Reason Some Families Have Internet Access and Others Don’t, New Research Finds,” The Hechinger Report, October 14, 2021.

Student Researchers: Payton Blair, Milan Spellman, and Emmanuel Thomas (Loyola Marymount University)

Faculty Evaluator: Kyra Pearson (Loyola Marymount University)

The post #19 Poor Infrastructure, a Legacy of Discriminatory Redlining, Inhibits Rural Black Americans’ Internet Access appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

The post The Retail Carrion Feeders of Rural America appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by George Goehl.

In the summer of 2022, a Chinese video blogger had a viral hit with what he intended as an inspirational tale of his great uncle, a resourceful elderly relative who made a living as a carpenter, and was still working well into his eighties.

But the narration also carried a sting in the tail: "Second Uncle really wants to earn a little retirement money for himself ... but my grandmother can't take care of herself any more, even telling me 'I don't want to live any more,' and that she once hung up a noose ready on the doorframe."

As ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping gears up to seek an unprecedented third term in office at the 20th party congress on Sunday, he will be claiming among his achievements the "eradication" of extreme poverty in China.

China declared in November 2020 that it had eliminated extreme poverty, claiming success for one of Xi's key policy goals ahead of the CCP's centenary the following year.

Yet as government-backed employment schemes have focused on getting younger people to seek jobs in cities, elderly people in rural areas have been left to eke a meager living from government subsidies, without the younger generation around to help, and without enough money for decent medical care.

Many are deciding such a life isn't worth living any more.

New research published in July 2022 and cited by state news agency Xinhua showed that the suicide rate among elderly people in rural areas has risen fivefold over the last two decades

"When you go to the countryside, you often hear that someone died, and when you ask about it, they often tell you it was pesticides [which means] suicide," former NGO worker Yao Cheng, who has researched women and children's rights in rural China, told RFA.

"In 2011, a German journalist and I went into a mountainous area of Hunan, where basically everyone in the village had left," Yao said. "It took two hours walking through the mountains to get there."

"The younger people in the village had all gone to find work ... and everyone left behind were old bachelors in their 60s and 70s," he said. "A lot of them were living on monthly subsistence payments from the government of less than 100 yuan [currently 170 yuan/month]."

"They didn't want to die in pain; I heard that they would hoard extra sleeping pills because they wouldn't have the strength to hang themselves if they were sick," he said. "Another common suicide method is drinking pesticides."

"They don't feel that they can carry on living any more."

A resident of a village in the eastern province of Anhui, who gave only the initial L, said at least two elderly people from his hometown have ended their lives during the past three or four years, often because of illness.

"The most urgent need in rural areas is medical care: general medical care; chronic disease care and treatment for serious illnesses," L said, adding that his mother-in-law currently struggles to find money for her glaucoma medication.

While her medical insurance once reimburse half of the 3,000 yuan annual cost, now she gets nothing at all, prompting L to wonder whether the funding has been taken up by the constant COVID-19 tests required under Xi Jinping's zero-COVID policy.

U.S.-based rights activist Chen Guangcheng, who has represented rural residents trying to defend their rights through legal channels, told a similar story.

"Elderly people in rural areas are actually forced to choose suicide by their circumstances," Chen said. "They are ultimately still dependent on the small amount of food they can produce from the land."

"Without mobility, they have nothing," he said.

Lack of economic security

Yu-Chih Chen, an assistant professor in social work and social administration at the University of Hong Kong who researches healthy aging, said China's elderly are fundamentally insecure.

"There's a saying in rural China that goes 'put off the small stuff, suffer through the big stuff, and don't go to hospital till you're at death's door'," Chen said.

"This is a reflection of the general lack of economic security and people's inability to meet their medical needs."

Data from China's 2020 national census found that nearly 24 percent of the rural population is now over 60, with more than 100 million elder people now living alone in the homes where they once raised their families.

Social isolation is also a major driving force behind suicide in this group, according to Chen Yu-Chih.

"Social isolation has been proven to drive mortality in academic studies," Chen said. "The impact on health is similar to the effect of smoking 15 cigarettes a day."

Conversely, a 2021 study by population researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that the suicide rate among older adults fell by 8.7 percent during the Lunar New Year holiday, when grown children return to their parental home.

Chen Guangcheng says the issue could be solved by better government policies.

"The CCP shouldn't misallocate its social resources," he said, adding that there is a huge imbalance in government spending across rural areas and cities.

More than 500 million people currently live in rural areas, around 36 percent of the population. Yet they depend for their healthcare on just 1.35 million rural clinics, of which only around 690,000 are staffed by certified doctors and healthcare workers, a ratio of one healthcare worker to more than 700 people.

Figures from 2021 showed a 40 percent drop in the number of people holding rural doctor certification, from 1.26 million in 2011, with an official study citing low pay and lack of security for old age and retirement as major factors behind the fall.

Yao Hao, a psychiatrist at the Shanghai Mental Health Center, penned an article earlier this year in the officially backed English-language media outlet Sixth Tone, sounding the alarm over a mental health crisis in rural areas.

"At present, the responsibility for caring for those with mental illnesses is shared between families, communities, and institutions, with families bearing the brunt of the burden," Yao wrote. "In China [there is a] social obligation for families to take care of members who are unwell."

"This obligation puts a huge amount of pressure on families, especially in poorer communities," he wrote. "Once that pressure exceeds the family’s ability to cope, problems are likely to arise; for example, patients are sometimes left in the hospital or locked in their homes."

Recent figures from China's National Aging Office, the ministry of civil affairs and finance ministry indicate that there are also 40.63 million disabled and semi-disabled elderly people in China, with just 44,000 qualified elder care workers in the entire country.

The lack of care workers often leaves rural elderly residents to rely on friends and neighbors for support, according to Chen Yu-Chih.

"But these resources aren't sustainable," Chen said. "They are unreliable and unstable."

A Beijing resident who gave only the initial C, whose grandmother took her own life, said lack of money is often enough of a reason for elderly people to take their own lives.

"Some people say that the elderly don't want to commit suicide; they just need pensions," C said. "Maybe Beijing and Shanghai have more in the way of pensions for the elderly, but in most areas, as far as I know ... there are actually very few pensions for the elderly."

"After my grandma passed away, the local government didn't respond in any way," C said. "I was pretty shocked. It's obviously due to a problem they created. How can they be so unjust and indifferent?"

Back in Anhui, L wanted to know why rural communities have always had to shoulder the burden of political, social and economic change in China.

"My grandfather had high blood pressure and had to take various medications for diseases of the elderly," L said. "It cost 800-900 yuan a month, adding up to around 10,000 yuan a year."

"That cost was astronomical for him, an old man living alone in the countryside."

"Ever since the [People's Republic of China] was founded in 1949, it has always been the rural areas and farming communities who have made the biggest sacrifices, including through the [post-1979] economic reforms," L said.

"They have always had inadequate education, medical care and pensions ... This is a huge segment of the population, and yet [those in power] can't tell that they are suffering, or they don't know why?"

"Haven't they suffered enough?"

Translated and edited by Luiseta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jane Tang and Guo Yasa for RFA Mandarin.

"Return to Dust," a love story about a couple who marry and eke out a living for themselves from farming despite being rejected by their own communities, was removed from online streaming platforms, with fans asking the movie's producers for the reason behind the move on social media.

"Not available," Weibo user @Loved_08791 wrote in a comment on Tuesday, with multiple "tears" emojis, while @wish_w wanted to know "why was it taken down?"

"It's gone from iQiyi," wrote @a_ah_yes_yes_yes_yes, adding "Why was it taken down?"

@Traveling_in_a_city wrote on Monday: "Is it due to copyright? Or some other factor?" while @Eat,_sleep_and_beat_the_boss asked: "Why can't I watch this film?"

Until a few weeks ago, Return to Dust seemed doomed to the same fate as many art-house films about rural Chinese life -- relative success at overseas festivals contrasting with relative obscurity back home.

After getting off to a slow start following its release on July 8, the film suddenly rebounded at the box office, raking in some U.S.$7.1 million by the beginning of September.

The film tracks the fates of protagonists Ma Laosi and Cao Guiying -- two people born and bred in rural Gansu province who have been rejected by their families.

They find solace together, marry, and set up house in a touching and fragile experience of coming home. But further injustice and hardship are just around the corner, with villagers declining to rescue a drowning Cao, and Ma committing suicide in grief.

The bleak ending quickly aroused the ire of CCP "public opinion" managers, who generally see media and cultural products as a tool to advance "positive stories" about China, along with party propaganda.

The film was denounced by Zheng Yanshi, a senior researcher at the Kunlun Research Institute, as having "ulterior motives," and "repeatedly hyping them up ahead of the party congress."

"How is the film-maker positioned here, and who are they speaking for," Zheng demanded to know in a Sept. 9 post. "How did you manage to let such a gross and terrible movie through?" he asked government censors.

Wang Ruiqin, a former member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference from Qinghai Province now living in the United States, said Return to Dust was a realistic portrait of rural life.

"I am a native of the northwest," Wang said. "I spent a long time in Qinghai and Gansu, and I'm very familiar with those places."

"This film paints a very vivid and realistic portrait of rural life in the northwest," he said.

He said CCP ideologues regard any story like that as a kind of attack on the ruling party.

"The ideological trend in China right now is that everything is influenced by CCP control, and the CCP regards [this sort of story] as a kind of slander, and it won't tolerate any kind of objective or accurate portrayals," Wang said.

"They only want to hear praise [for the CCP], and will attack anything to do with social injustice as unacceptable," he said.

Zhu Rikun, an independent film producer based in New York, said movies in China are expected to meet the political needs of the regime.

"It is all about the political needs of the Chinese government, which sees movies as a political tool to serve the regime," Zhu told RFA. "It's rare to see this kind of [more realistic] film, because they are overshadowed by China's [official] cultural output."

The movie's demise in Chinese movie theaters and streaming sites came as police and officials on the ground stepped up operations aimed at preventing petitioners -- ordinary Chinese people pursuing complaints against official wrongdoing -- from being heard ahead of the party congress.

Crackdown on petitioners

Police have been contacting landlords and going door-to-door in suburbs of Beijing known to be home to thousands of out-of-town petitioners, forcing landlords to evict them, or detaining them and sending them home under official escort, petitioners told RFA.

In one video clip posted to social media on Tuesday, the person shooting shows steel barriers around the entrance to the State Bureau of Letters and Visits, or complaints department, preventing anyone from getting close to the building.

"It's Sept. 26, 2022, and just look at the bureau of letters and visits," the voice says. "It's surrounded by steel plating -- I really don't know what's going on."

A petitioner Zhou said the level of security is unprecedented.

"Local governments always have control measures before major meetings, and petitioners get escorted [back to their hometowns], but the State Bureau of Letters and Visits has always stayed open," she said. "This year is a bit unusual."

She said many petitioners across China are being prevented from going anywhere via the "Health Code" COVID-19 app, because their codes are being turned red, barring them from public transportation.

"You can't get on a train or bus at all with a red code, so the Health Code is also a means of control," she said.

A petitioner surnamed Cheng agreed. "I don't think it's ever been blocked off before," she said, while a Beijing petitioner surnamed Tang said: "This is not normal -- it's a very strange phenomenon."

Tang said police are out in petitioner neighborhoods checking people's ID on the streets.

"If you try to rent an apartment, the landlord will ask for your ID card, which will then be uploaded to the police station," she said. "Everyone has to leave Beijing."

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jing Wei and Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

Chuseok is the Korean version of the autumn harvest festival celebrated throughout northeast Asia. The holiday draws comparisons to Thanksgiving in the U.S. as people both in North and South Korea travel to be with their extended families and pay tribute to their ancestors by preparing a large ceremonial feast in a "jesa" ceremony.

In a typical jesa, various foods are arranged on a table in a specific way to honor the ancestors, and no jesa table is complete without fruits arranged into a pyramid, with the tops lopped off to signify they are meant for the deceased.

But all of the best fruits in North Korea went to the privileged residents of Pyongyang this year, angering inhabitants of the provinces.

“The best apples have been supplied to all households in Pyongyang and were said to be examples of [North Korean leader] ‘Kim Jong Un’s compassion and love,’” a resident of Tanchon in the eastern province of South Hamgyong told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“Many people out here are outraged by the news that Pyongyang residents get the finest apples and peaches. It's like we in the provinces aren't really considered citizens,” he said.

The military was even mobilized to deliver the fruits to the produce stores in the capital starting Aug. 26, according to the source.

“The fruits are then given to every household. Due to the large population of Pyongyang, only a few fruits are provided to each resident, but not even a single fruit has been given to the provincial residents,” the source said.

According to the source, the peaches come from Kwail county in South Hwanghae province, and apples come from the Taedonggang Combined Fruit Farm. The government used citizen labor to build fruit farms and processing factories in both locations, promising that an abundance of various kinds of fruits would be supplied nationwide.

“However, the fruits they produce are only supplied to high-ranking officials and Pyongyang citizens. I feel outraged that the Workers' Party has deceived the provincial residents,” he said.

“It is not the first time that the authorities discriminated against provincial residents,” the source said. Living in Pyongyang is a privilege reserved only for the most loyal citizens. Those lucky enough to live there have better access to food, jobs, and education, and receive other perks and benefits unavailable to their provincial counterparts.

“It is no exaggeration to say that [Pyongyang and the provinces] are two different countries,” he said.

The people of Pochon county in the northern province of Ryanggnang, meanwhile, are angry and frustrated by the government’s show of favoritism this Chuseok, a source there told RFA. 

“I was selected as part of a mobilization effort … in the construction of the Taedonggang Combined Fruit Farm over a six-month period,” he said. “I worked hard by leveling the land and planting fruit trees. There must be a lot of funds and materials that each provincial family was forced to donate for the construction of the fruit farm.”

“Tremendous effort and sweat of countless provincial residents has gone into each fruit that comes out of Taedonggang, but the fruits are only supplied to Pyongyang, so who would not complain?” the second source said.

The second source was critical of Kim and the ruling Korean Workers’ Party for trying to solve the country’s problems by making life better in Pyongyang.

“The authorities’ favoritism for Pyongyang residents is unfair treatment that ignores and discriminates against provincial residents. We are more than eight times the population of Pyongyang,” he said.

Translated by Leejin J. Chung. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chang Gyu Ahn for RFA Korean.

Citizens of Dunn County, Wisconsin, have a plan to place national, publicly-funded health care for everyone on their November 8th county ballot.  In June and July at meetings of the County Board of Supervisors, many spoke of a broken health care system and their proposal to fix it.  After the third meeting, the Board voted unanimously to put the following question on the ballot:  

“Shall Congress and the President of the United States enact into law the creation of a publicly financed, non-profit, national health insurance program that would fully cover medical care costs for all Americans?”

Located in central west Wisconsin and blessed with lakes and farmland, Dunn County is far from bustling cities. About 16,000 of its 45,000 residents live in Menomonie, the county seat, named by the Smithsonian as “One of the Best Small Towns in the USA.”

“Nobody in my family is going to retire sitting pretty and most of the reason for that can be laid at having to pay off medical expenses, even though we were insured, for months and months and months, and that is money we did not spend on all the things that you can spend money on right here in beautiful Dunn County.”

By focusing on the health care crisis in America’s heartland, the people of Dunn County hope to propel the issue onto the nation’s agenda.  They believe that rural concern for neighbors just may outweigh the rancorous partisan divide, and with the idea spreading, influence a Congress that has, so far, refused to consider Medicare for All.

On July 27, 2022, between the pledge of allegiance and the story of how the county fair proceeded despite the windstorm that took out the electric milking machines, they stepped to the microphone at the Board of Supervisors’ meeting to insist that those who represent them allow their voices to be heard in a ballot referendum.  

Margie Hagerman of Menomonie spoke first. “The health care of the majority of Americans has been declining in recent years with lower life expectancy than other developed countries. Other… countries have found ways to cover everyone through a national, non-profit, health insurance system. Why can’t the United States?”

“If you put a referendum out you're giving a voice to the people--you need to do that because we exist only by the consent of the people,” said Michel Brandt.

John Hoff said, “currently the drug pharmaceutical system is totally stacked against the individual—yes, they're working on something in congress but that's only for 20 drugs.” 

Tom Walsh told of his son, a small business owner, who, since the Affordable Care Act, has paid $750 a month for insurance with a $5,000 deductible. “He can get one physical exam a year—that will be free…but the rest of it he pays out of his pocket.  We need Medicare for All basically to save small business owners, save people that are susceptible to bankruptcy because they can't afford to pay for their insurance and if they do have it the deductible is so high it really doesn't help that much…so we really need a national health insurance program.”

Steve Hogseth called attention to the top 23 countries ranked for their democracy and asserted that, of them, the United States was the only one without universal health care of some form.

Lenore Mercer spoke of working in a clinic when the former governor suspended Badger Care. “I'll always remember a clean-cut, hard-working, full-time employed father breaking down and saying I’m not worried about myself, but for my kids, how will they get to see a doctor? I thought this is so wrong.” 

“Our for-profit driven system balloons profits for insurance companies and drug manufacturers and now millions of Americans can't afford health care,” Mercer concluded.

Retired physician Lorene Vedder ended her comments by asking those in the audience who supported putting this measure on the November 8th ballot to please stand. All rose.

Monica Berrier, Dunn County Supervisor for District 13, weighed in at the Legislative Committee Meeting. “I want to make the argument that it really is in the county's interest to be advocating for a better health care system… I'll do this through the perspective of our budget and whether the current system is a responsible use of taxpayer dollars.”

She said that the county spends about $500,000 each month on health insurance and that in the 2022 budget, $10 million out of a $90 million budget has been set aside for health insurance. The $90 million is not just for personnel but includes all county operations. 

“So we’re spending a lot but when we compare that to what the employees are actually getting it’s a pretty bad deal. They’re part of a system where delays and even outright denials of care are routine.  I believe that as elected officials and stewards of taxpayer dollars we have a responsibility to demand better of the federal government that serves us.”

Berrier laid it out. “I want to close by thinking about what we could do with this money instead.  We all know that the budget process comes down to higgling over fifty dollars here a hundred dollars there.  A couple months ago we had a good discussion about the wheel tax and many of us including myself are worried about the potential impact that this might have on people who can't afford it.  For comparison, the wheel tax brings in just $700,000 every year and that's peanuts compared to the 10 million dollars we are budgeted to spend on health insurance this year…instead of wringing our hands over the wheel tax we could be just fixing the roads instead. I think that we as elected officials really have a responsibility to advocate for a more efficient health care system”

Dr. Vedder had spoken earlier to the Dunn County Executive Committee.  “My chief concern is a decreasing life expectancy that we have in this country. If you compare Canada to the United States, they live 4.5 years longer than we do.  Back in 1970 we lived the same life expectancy so why are we seeing this difference?

“People are afraid here in our country to access health care because of the excess cost of medical care--30 million people in this country don't have health care insurance, 44 % don't have the funds to obtain medical care even if they have insurance.

“We access health care a lot less than any developed country in the world. By avoiding health care we have our people…coming to emergency rooms when it's too late to treat them, their disease is too advanced.  We bankrupt people over medical bills—nowhere else in the developed world are people bankrupted by their health.”  

Someone announced that the issue would be placed on the agenda for the Legislative Committee.

The health care advocates came prepared to speak at the Legislative Committee Meeting on July 20.  At a couple of minutes per person, they filled the first 35 minutes of the meeting.  Dr. Steve Brown told of his wife using health care services in Portugal, receiving x-ray, lab services and IV antibiotics.  She was diagnosed with Legionnaires disease and received good care.  He said that even though they did not have travel insurance, the bill was reasonable—about $160.

Steve Carlson of Trego spoke of a precedent in Wisconsin for a health care ballot question fourteen years ago when county voters agreed that everyone in the state should have health care coverage equal to state officials.  He said that people in Washburn, Douglas, and Portage counties are working on placing referenda, like the current one proposed in Dunn County, on the ballot for the Spring election.

Louisa Gerasimo told of medical bills that depleted retirement savings. “Nobody in my family is going to retire sitting pretty and most of the reason for that can be laid at having to pay off medical expenses, even though we were insured, for months and months and months, and that is money we did not spend on all the things that you can spend money on right here in beautiful Dunn County.”

Commission Hager commented that this issue had roused the most public interest and comment since the ATV county road expansion.  The supervisors voted unanimously to place the issue on the ballot.  Chair Kelly McCullough said, “Looks like we will be having the referendum all right…that also answers the question of pressuring your legislators—does it work—it looks like it all right.”

Rural health care is in deep crisis. Over 800 rural hospitals are under threat of closing.  Rural physicians struggle to survive on the meager payments of Medicaid.  Mergers and acquisitions accelerate the pain as hospitals are bought up by those whose only concern is profit.  Delayed care causes untold suffering and death.  Is it possible that the people of these rural communities, under the stress of a broken health care system, can spark a movement to fix health care for the nation?

Some people in Dunn County think so and are working to make it happen. 

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kay Tillow.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Khin Zaw Win.

The country is suffering from a shortage of food, unable to produce enough to feed its population of more than 25 million people and unable to bridge the gap with imports due to trade restrictions designed to curb the spread of COVID-19.

The CIA World Factbook estimates that the food gap in North Korea is 860,000 metric tons (about 950,000 U.S. tons), or about two to three months’ worth of food consumption.

Sources told RFA that although the patrols are intended to stop thieves, innocent people who happened to be carrying grains and merchants who rely on the grain trade to make a living have also been caught in the dragnet.

In the city of Tokchon, north of Pyongyang in South Pyongan province, the inspection squads have been deployed to every street that goes to the farms to inspect passersby for illicit grains, a source in the province told RFA’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

“Yesterday, the corn inspection squad consisted of two members who stood guard on the road on the way out to the city from Sinsong village to the city downtown,” the source said. “They stayed there all day, checking people’s bags and bundles. They checked my backpack.

“I had grains of corn and kidney beans in my backpack, which my relative in rural Sinsong village gave me,” the source said. “As soon as the corn inspection squad saw the corn and beans, they tried to confiscate them, accusing me by asking, ‘Didn’t you steal it from the cooperative farm?’ An argument broke out on the spot.”

The source said patrol members forced her to go back to the village to get confirmation that the grain had been given to him by his relatives.

“I was so angry that they told me to do that,” she said.

In North Hwanghae province, south of Pyongyang, corn inspection squads will be on duty until the harvest in September, a source there told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

“The crackdown and control by the corn inspection squad is more focused on merchants who load large quantities of corn onto buses and distribute it to other markets at bus stops that take it to various parts of the country,” said the second source.

“Merchants who were targeted by the police lost whole corn sacks. They are protesting that they did not steal the corn from the cooperative farms, but that the individual farmers bought the corn, harvested from the farmers' gardens,” she said.

The second source explained that farmers who live in rural farms own gardens sized 50 pyeong or larger (1779 square feet). There they can plant and cultivate corn for private use. If a merchant can buy corn from 10 farmers, it is almost as if they bought the corn in bulk.

“Residents criticize the crackdown, saying that the authorities are punishing people who trade grain to make ends meet,”she said. “The authorities have not thought of supplying food to the residents but encouraged higher food prices in the marketplaces.”

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hyemin Son for RFA Korean.

On June 15, police in the north-central town of Dinguiraye summoned Sagnane, a reporter with the community broadcaster Dinguiraye Rural Radio, according to the journalist, who spoke to CPJ by phone, and a statement by the local journalist association Presse Solidaire.

Police held Sagnane at the Dinguiraye Court of First Instance, seized his phone, and refused to let him contact anyone while they questioned him about a broadcast he aired on June 8, according to those sources. After about six hours, authorities released Sagnane and told him to go home, saying they would contact him “as soon as they needed me,” the journalist said.

“Guinean journalist Mamadou Sagnane should not have been detained over his work, and authorities must ensure he does not face legal repercussions for doing his job,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in Johannesburg, South Africa. “Journalists in Guinea should be able to distribute news of public interest without fear.”

In that June 8 broadcast, Sagnane told CPJ that he read a press release calling for a rally over the recent killing of a young man at a gendarmerie roadblock. When police asked Sagnane why he read that press release, he said that a local association had sent it to the director of Dinguiraye Rural Radio, who saw that it contained no calls for violence and then asked him to read it on-air.

He said he referred the officers to the station’s director for further questions.

The rally mentioned in the press release did not take place as scheduled on June 9, but protesters angered over the killing attacked a local gendarmerie office and police station, according to Sagnane and news reports. Sagnane said that the police alleged that those attacks were linked to his airing of the press release, even though it did not call for such actions.

Dinguiraye government representative Karamoko Oumar Boké Camara told CPJ via messaging app that he said he could comment on the case because he did not have permission from his superiors. CPJ called the Guinean judicial police and contacted them via messaging app for comment, but did not receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Deconstructed.

After two years of denying the pandemic had penetrated its closed borders, North Korea in May declared a “maximum emergency” and acknowledged the virus had begun to spread among participants of a large-scale military parade the previous month.

Medicine to treat the disease is in short supply and the stocks that are available are getting sent to Pyongyang, home of the country’s wealthiest and most privileged citizens. The drug shortage has left an opening for a black market of unproven traditional medicine to emerge, with some citizens offering dried deer blood as a COVID remedy. Counterfeit versions of fever reducers like aspirin and acetaminophen are also on the rise, sources said.

“All pharmacies are open 24 hours a day in this maximum emergency, but there is a huge difference between Pyongyang and the provincial areas, so people out here are really dissatisfied,” a resident of the northwestern province of North Pyongan told RFA on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“Expectations were high as the central quarantine command had intensive discussions where they agreed to quickly distribute the reserve stocks of medicines for the emergency, but we were greatly disappointed when that medicine was given to people in Pyongyang and to the military,” he said.

In the city of Sinuiju, which lies across the Yalu River border from China, no one can find even basic medicines like fever reducers and painkillers, the source said.

“Reserve medicines were supplied in very small amounts to hospitals, and pharmacy shelves are empty,” he said.

“At least some pharmacies in Sinuiju are stocked with herbal medicines used as a cold medicine, but county-level pharmacies are completely empty. However, the pharmacies are ordered to be open 24 hours a day unconditionally,” he said, adding that salespeople and security guards are sitting around at the pharmacies day and night, even if they have nothing to sell.

In the city of Chongjin in northeastern province of North Hamgyong, patients complaining of a high fever and cough have increased, a resident there told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

North Korea lacks adequate testing capabilities to confirm coronavirus cases but has been tracking numbers of patients reporting “fever.”

“An acquaintance who is a doctor at a provincial hospital told me that even when patients with coronavirus symptoms come to the hospital, they are unable to receive the proper treatment because there is no medicine,” said the second source.

“According to my acquaintance, medicines are normally supplied to hospitals and pharmacies in Pyongyang, and patients with fever in Pyongyang are receiving intensive treatment at quarantine facilities. But even though pharmacies in Chongjin are open 24 hours a day, but there is no medicine or only herbal medicines whose efficacy has not been verified. So it is not helpful to patients at all,” he said. 

“They complain saying, ‘Are Pyongyangers the only citizens of the state? Is it okay for us in the provinces to just die?’” the source said. 

To deal with the shortage of medicine in the provinces, people are turning to the black market, where unproven traditional remedies like deer blood are sold.

In Pyongysong, South Pyongan province, north of Pyongyang, people are illegally selling deer blood from their homes, touting its medicinal properties as effective against COVID-19, a resident there told RFA on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.

“The types of deer blood traded on the black market are raw blood and dried blood powder. Raw blood in a tiny penicillin bottle is 10,000 won [about US$1.80], and powdered blood in a penicillin bottle is 5,000 won [about US$0.90],” she said.

“If you catch a deer, you can drain its blood. Then you put the blood in a plastic bag,” she said. “Raw blood spoils, so it’s hard to sell. So, people dry the blood and sell it. When a deer gives birth, there is placenta coming out. They also dry it and sell it as a treatment for coronavirus.”

The deer blood remedy is available in North Pyongan as well, a resident there, who declined to be named for safety reasons, told RFA.

She said that rather than catching the deer in the wild, the workers on a deer farm that supplies meat and other byproducts for Kim Jong Un, his family, and other high-ranking officials, are illicitly selling the blood on the black market.

“The musk or placenta of deer are vacuum packed and usually sent to the Central Committee, but the people who work there are secretly selling it.”

Counterfeit medicines that look like the real thing but have no effect at all are also being sold. Fakes have made their way to the local marketplaces in Chongjin, a source there told RFA on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“The authorities are making a fuss saying they are responding to coronavirus by releasing the national reserve medicines, but there’s still a shortage here so counterfeiters are taking advantage of this opportunity,” the second Chongjin source told RFA.

“A few days ago, the head of the neighborhood watch unit circulated a notice from the district to each household. The notice warns of the fake drugs out in circulation. There are many people around me who bought fake medicines and suffered from taking them,” the second Chongjin source said.

“There are various types of counterfeit medicines, such as antipyretic analgesics such as aspirin and acetaminophen [Tylenol], and multivitamins, which are frequently sought by people to treat coronavirus infection. A friend from my workplace had a fever, so he bought acetaminophen at the market and took it for two days. But it was fake and didn’t work at all,” the second Chongjin source said.

The counterfeit was indistinguishable from the real deal, according to the second Chongjin resident.

“I saw the fake medicine that my friend bought. The packaging looked quite real. It appears to have been made using a pharmaceutical factory facility, with foreign characters engraved on one side of the pill. I’ve heard that medicine dealers bribe pharmaceutical factory officials and rent factory equipment at night to make fake medicines secretly.”

Traveling merchants bring the fakes to distant parts of the country where they know there is a shortage, a resident of Taehongdan county, in the northern province of Ryanggang, told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

“Last week, some people in my neighborhood bought aspirin and other meds from a travelling merchant who visited our village. One of the people with cold symptoms took the medicine, but it did not work. So he showed the aspirin and multivitamins he bought to the doctor,” the Ryanggang source said.

“The doctor tested it by biting a pill and burning it. He then said the multivitamins tasted wrong and the aspirin was too hard, so it seems as if the medicines were fakes made of wheat flour.”

Though North Korea has acknowledged that the virus is spreading inside the country, it has only reported a handful of confirmed COVID-19 cases. Data published on the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center showed North Korea with only one confirmed COVID-19 case and six deaths as of Tuesday evening.

The country is, however, keeping track of numbers of people who exhibit symptoms of COVID-19.

About 3.6 million people have been hit by outbreaks of fever, 69 of whom have died, according to data based on the most recent reports from North Korean state media published by 38 North. Around 3.5 million are reported to have made recoveries, while around 182,900 are undergoing treatment.

The state-run Korea Central News Agency reported Sunday that the country’s powerful Political Bureau positively evaluated the national pandemic response, saying the pandemic situation was “being controlled and improved across the country.”

Translated by Claire Lee and Leejin J. Chung. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jieun Kim, Hyemin Son, and Changgyu Ahn for RFA Korean.

A store covered with Trump signs in support of the former president is seen in Steep Falls, Maine, on Aug. 5, 2021.

Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

Map of Maine highlighting Lincoln County.

Map: The Intercept; Wikimedia

Senate President Troy Jackson, D-Aroostook, conducts business at the State House in Augusta, Maine, on April 12, 2022.

Photo: Robert F. Bukaty/AP

“While Chloe used her candidates’ campaign to test her theory of deep organizing, the focus on actually winning her race went to the Senate Campaign Committee and volunteers.”

Chloe Maxmin, a co-founder of Divest Harvard, and other students staged a sit-in in Massachusetts Hall to protest the university’s decision not to divest from fossil fuel companies in Cambridge, Mass., on Feb. 12, 2015.

Photo: Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Andy O’Brien.

Bounded by the Bitterroot Mountains to the west and the Sapphire Mountains to the east, Montana’s Bitterroot Valley is home to renowned fly fishing streams and soaring vistas. Its forests, however, are facing the greatest wildfire risk in the entire state, with towns like Florence, Victor, and Darby all in the nation’s 98th-plus percentile for risk. Yet houses continue to be built at a rapid clip, many of them in hazardous areas.

Theoretically, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a $1.2 trillion bill that funds improvements in transportation, water, energy, broadband, and climate resilience projects, should be able to help. The legislation, signed into law by President Joe Biden in November 2021, includes money to make forests more resilient to fire and defend at-risk communities. But according to a recent analysis by the Montana-based research group Headwaters Economics, over half of the communities in the West might not be able to access those funds.

Researchers examined 10 factors that influenced how well-equipped communities were to apply for grant funding, and then used those factors to calculate each county and community’s “rural capacity” score. For instance, Missoula County, Montana, home to the state’s second-largest city and flagship university campus, scored 94 out of 100, while Carter County, Montana, where there is no county head of planning and just 20 percent of adult residents have attended college, scored just 45, the lowest in the state.  

Within the West, Montana stands out: More than three-quarters of its communities have index scores below the national median. The state’s low capacity exemplifies the challenges rural communities across the West face, including a reliance on boom-and-bust industries that create financial instability, and a lack of grant writers, land-use planners, and emergency planners that would be helpful in applying for federal funds. “You go to a rural community, and typically the mayor is almost always part-time,” said Don Albrecht, director of the Western Rural Development Center at Utah State University. “They don’t have the resources or the experience or the expertise to even write grants to get the money in the first place.”

More than half the communities in Wyoming, New Mexico, and Idaho rank below the national median on Headwaters’ rural capacity index scoring system. Clark County, Idaho; Esmeralda County, Nevada; and Jackson County, Colorado, like Carter County in Montana, also received capacity scores in the 40s. At the same time, Headwaters also found that many of the rural communities rated as having low capacity also face the highest climate threats.

When overlaid with data about flood and wildfire risk, Headwaters’ analysis reveals areas with stark capacity barriers, often exacerbated by historical injustices, as well as high vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. In Montana and elsewhere, many of these communities are on or near Native American reservations. In the town of Hays on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, for example, capacity is among the lowest 5 percent in the country, while both wildfire and flood risk are higher than in 90 percent of the country.

In theory, the $47 billion the infrastructure bill designates for climate resilience can help communities prepare for floods, fires, storms, and droughts. But Headwaters’ analysis suggests that areas with low capacity might not submit requests in the first place. “The point of this was to shed light on major barriers that exist for communities trying to plan and finance climate adaptation projects,” said Patty Hernandez, the executive director of Headwaters Economics. “For our team, it was really striking how widespread the problem is.”

Over the next few weeks, the Biden team is taking a cross-country tour to discuss the legislation ahead of the midterm elections in November, with a particular focus on rural areas. According to Mitch Landrieu, Biden’s infrastructure czar, officials will stop in a handful of Western states, including Colorado, Alaska, Arizona, Washington, and Nevada. Behind the scenes, federal agencies in charge of divvying up infrastructure funding are defining grant guidelines and making spending plans. “These decisions are being made right now that will impact the ability of rural communities to access the dollars that are coming online,” Hernandez said.

Officials say that access for rural communities is their top priority, pointing to their “rural playbook,” which details money set aside for urgent rural issues like broadband internet access and upgrading electricity and wastewater systems. Last Wednesday, the Biden administration launched a pilot program called the Rural Partners Network, designed to address capacity issues by putting staff on the ground in rural communities to “provide local leaders with the expertise to navigate federal programs,” according to a fact sheet from the USDA.

It’s essential for state and federal officials to work directly with communities in order to make sure that the money gets where it’s most needed, Albrecht said. Otherwise, those with more resources will “lap” it all up. According to The Washington Post, municipalities from Florida to California are already hiring lobbyists to influence where infrastructure money goes.

There are also policies the Biden administration could enact to give communities a fair shot at funds, Headwaters’ analysis suggests. The administration could eliminate requirements for communities to match contributions from federal grants, which can be difficult in sparsely populated areas with a limited tax base. Granting agencies could even directly identify places with high need and award them money without requiring applications. Hernandez said that new approaches are necessary to give rural towns across Montana, and the West, a chance. “I can’t imagine a scenario,” she said, “where a one-size-fits-all rubric for scoring proposals is ever going to work out for rural communities.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why rural communities struggle to bring in much-needed federal grants on May 3, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kylie Mohr.

Arguing that the Democratic Party and its candidates have "willfully abandoned rural communities" as they focus on winning in the cities and suburbs, a progressive Maine state lawmaker and her campaign manager offer a dire warning—and solutions—in a Monday op-ed.

"The only way for Democrats to regain traction in rural places is by running strong campaigns in districts that usually back Republicans."

Writing in The New York Times, Maine state Sen. Chloe Maxmin (D-13) and Canyon Woodward accuse Democrats of being "out of touch and impersonal" in their approach to rural voters. As a result, "Republicans control dozens of state legislatures, and Democrats have only tenuous majorities in Congress at a time in history when we simply can't afford to cede an inch."

"The party can't wait to start correcting course," they assert. "It may be too late to prevent a blowout in the fall, but the future of progressive politics—and indeed our democracy—demands that we revive our relationship with rural communities."

"As two young progressives raised in the country, we were dismayed as small towns like ours swung to the right," they write. "But we believed that Democrats could still win conservative rural districts if they took the time to drive down the long dirt roads where we grew up, have face-to-face conversations with moderate Republican and independent voters, and speak a different language, one rooted in values rather than policy."

The authors continue:

It worked for us. As a 25-year-old climate activist with unabashedly progressive politics, Chloe was an unlikely choice to be competitive—let alone win—in a conservative district that falls mostly within the bounds of a rural Maine county that has the oldest population in the state. But in 2018, she won a state House seat there with almost 53% of the vote.

Two years later, she ran for state Senate, challenging the highest-ranking Republican in state office, the Senate minority leader. And again, in one of the most rural districts in the state, voters chose the young, first-term Democrat who sponsored one of the first Green New Deal policies to pass a state legislature.

Maxmin and Woodward argue that candidates "need not be Joe Manchin-like conservative" to win rural elections, a reference to the right-wing U.S. senator from West Virginia who has almost single-handedly stymied so much of his own party's agenda.

However, they stress that Democrats must eschew a "blinkered strategy" that ignores or writes off rural voters as unreachable or irrelevant.

"This isn't just a story about rural Maine," the pair write. "It's about a nationwide pattern of neglect that goes back years. After the 2010 midterms, when the Democrats lost 63 House seats, Nancy Pelosi, then the House minority leader, disbanded the House Democratic Rural Working Group. Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada later eliminated the Senate's rural outreach group."

By 2016, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's campaign "had only a single staff person doing rural outreach from its headquarters, in Brooklyn; the staffer had been assigned to the role just weeks before the election," they add. "And in 2018, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Perez, told MSNBC, 'You can't door-knock in rural America.'"

"Ceding rural America leaves a narrow path to victory even in the best circumstances," the authors argue. "When the landscape is more difficult, Democrats set themselves up for catastrophic defeat. But we don't have to cede these parts of the country. Democrats have to change the way they think about them and relate to the voters who live there."

This means recognizing that "rural life is rooted in shared values of independence, common sense, tradition, frugality, community, and hard work," and that "politicians lose rural people when they regurgitate politically triangulated lines and talk about the vagaries of policy."

"Something has to change," warn Maxmin and Woodward. "The Democrats need a profoundly different strategy if they are to restore their reputation as champions of working people, committed to improving their lives, undaunted by wealth and power."

"In our view, the only way for Democrats to regain traction in rural places is by running strong campaigns in districts that usually back Republicans," they contend. "This change starts with having face-to-face conversations to rebuild trust and faith not only in Democrats but also in the democratic process. Even though it's hard work with no guaranteed outcome, it is necessary—even if we don't win."

The duo says they "feel every day the profound urgency of our times, the existential necessity of racial justice, the impending doom of the climate crisis, the imperative to reform our criminal justice system, and so much more."

"At the same time, as a party we've made some big mistakes as we walk down the road to a better world," they add. "Abandoning rural voters could be one of the costliest. But it's not too late to make amends, to rebuild our relationship with the quiet roads of rural America. We have to hit the ground running, today, this cycle, and recommit ourselves to the kind of politics that reaches every corner of our country."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Lack of infrastructure and financial resources available to these areas contribute to this “digital divide.” The Thomson Reuters Foundation that passage of a $1.75 trillion infrastructure bill would direct $65 billion to expanding broadband access, making it “the biggest broadband investment in our history to close the digital divide,” according to US Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO). (In November, 2021 the House of Representatives passed this bill, the Build Back Better Act—but it stalled in the Senate when Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) withdrew his support.)

Javeria Salman reported for the Hechinger Report on the historical background to the current “digital divide.” Her article showed how Depression-era federal housing policies, including especially the discriminatory practice of “redlining,” directly correlate with places that, today, lack good internet access. Researchers from the University of Florida who have examined the links between disparities in current broadband access and past discriminatory federal housing policies told the Hechinger Report that “despite internet service providers reporting similar technological availability across neighborhoods, access to broadband in the home generally decreases in tandem with historic neighborhood risk classification.”

Although many news outlets have reported on the United States’ “digital divide,” corporate news sources, such as the New York Times and CNN, have not addressed the deep historical roots of disparities in broadband access.

Sources:

Avi Asher-Schapiro and David Sherfinski, “‘Digital Divide’ Hits Rural Black Americans Hardest,” Thomson Reuters Foundation News, October 6, 2021.

Javeria Salman, “Racial Segregation Is One Reason Some Families Have Internet Access and Others Don’t, New Research Finds,” The Hechinger Report, October 14, 2021.

Student Researchers: Payton Blair, Milan Spellman, and Emmanuel Thomas (Loyola Marymount University)

Faculty Evaluator: Kyra Pearson (Loyola Marymount University)

The post Poor Infrastructure, a Legacy of Discriminatory Redlining, Inhibits Rural Black Americans’ Internet Access appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

The independent, nonprofit schools were established by Japan Relief for Cambodia and World Assistance for Cambodia (JRfC-WAfC). They provided English classes and computer training to rural students from low-income families, the network said on its website.

Local news outlet CamboJA reported that a Feb. 2 letter from Cambodia’s Education Minister Hang Chuon Naron, shared by teachers this week on Facebook, ordered the organization to cease operations.

The minister told RFA’s Khmer Service Thursday that the Education Ministry asked JRfC-WAfC to stop operating the schools because it is affiliated with the Cambodia Daily, an English language newspaper that often criticized the government of Hun Sen and was shuttered in Cambodia in 2017 on allegations that it hadn’t paid millions of U.S. dollars in back taxes.

The Cambodia Daily continues to operate online and broadcasts in the Khmer language from a location in the U.S.

Even though JRfC-WAfC may no longer operate out of Cambodia, the schools that built by the NGO are still allowed to remain open since they were donated to the government after construction, the minister said.

The programs provided by the NGO will no longer be available, however, a fact that Ouk Chhayavy, president of the Cambodian Independent Teachers Association, lamented.

“We are sad about the closure because the NGO helped many poor students,” she said. 

Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

Authorities started the greenhouse farm project, the first of its kind in North Korea, in Jungphyong village, which is part of Kyongsong county in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong. The farm sits on 490 acres of land and includes about 300 greenhouses.

“The authorities loudly propagated that the residents of North Hamgyong and Kyongsong county would greatly benefit from the greenhouse construction project, but the vegetables ended up not being for people like us,” a resident of the county told RFA’s Korean Service.

“Last week, the Rodong Sinmun newspaper reported that the Jungphyong Vegetable Greenhouse Farm had produced about 10,000 tons of fresh produce, including cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce and crown daisy,” said the source. Crown daisy is a popular leafy vegetable.

The newspaper report said that the vegetables were delivered to the people of the province last year, according to the source, who requested anonymity for security reasons.

“But in actuality, ordinary residents of Kyongsong county have never been given a single vegetable grown from those greenhouses,” he said.

The dismay is all the greater because authorities relied on residents of the county to build the project.

“They worked for over a year. Not many people complained because they had the hope that they would be able to eat their fill of vegetables in the very near future,” the source said.

“None of the vegetables went to the province. I heard from a friend who works at the greenhouse farm that most of the vegetables were selected as a No. 9 product and loaded onto the train to Pyongyang,” he said, using the government designation for items intended for use by the Kim family.

The Jungphyong Vegetable Greenhouse Farm was a pilot program. Now that it has been consistently producing, the government has plans to expand the program.

Another greenhouse farm is already under construction in nearby South Hamgyong province’s Hamju county, another Kyongsong resident told RFA.

“The residents of Hamju county have been mobilized for the construction work. Even when they complete their new greenhouse farm, they will never have a chance to eat any of the veggies,” said the second source, who requested anonymity to speak freely.

“When they were building the greenhouse farm up here in Jungphyong, the local housewives supported the construction effort, even sending in homemade soil for use in the farms. Despite their personal sacrifices, the housewives never received any vegetables,” she said.

High-ranking officials who live nearby instead call up the farm and take the vegetables as they please, the second source said.

“They never lifted a shovel, but they are taking full advantage of the farms. Even in the middle of winter, a car will come to their house every few days loaded with fresh cucumbers, crown daisy and lettuce from the greenhouses,” she said.

“Occasionally, if you pass in front of a greenhouse farm, you will see vehicles with license plates from powerful organizations. … As with everything in North Korea, the greenhouse farm wasn’t really for the local people as they said. It is only for the privileged and the elite,” the second source said.

The authorities have plans to expand greenhouse farms to other provinces.

“Following North and South Hamgyong, they are talking up how they will have these greenhouse farms in every province in the near future. No matter how many they build, what will change? For ordinary folks like us, vegetables are still a pie in the sky dream,” she said.

Translated by Claire Lee and Leejin Jun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chang Gyu Ahn.

The post “We Could Have Really Used the Compensation:” COVID’s Second Wave in Rural India appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Parth M.N..