By Fiona L.Q. Flaherty for Cronkite News.
Broadcast version by Alex Gonzalez for Arizona News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

For many years, Tsegi Canyon on the Navajo Nation struggled: Its dry walls and streambanks were eroding, exposing crumbling red soil to the desert sky. Its springs were drying up; native plants were few and far between on the canyon floor, often replaced by invasive weeds.

This land, beautiful and remote, was tired, said Nicholas Chischilly, a wildlife technician with the Navajo Nation Climate Change Program, which operates under the tribe's Department of Fish and Wildlife.

There's a lot of history there, he said, and secluded Tsegi Canyon, - 13 miles from Kayenta near the Navajo National Monument - is one of the few places on the reservation where water flows year round.

Chischilly recalls hearing elders tell stories about days long past, when knee-high grass kept sheep and cattle healthy and fat across the vast nation.

But in recent years, he said, entering Tsegi Canyon was like going into another world.

"The stream banks were collapsing. Plant life was barely holding on. The families who live there told us about thousand-pound sections of cliff that fell off," Chischilly said. "We've also heard that the canyon has been eroding so fast that a lot of people thought that if their elders were to come back to the area, they would not recognize it."

But in a place where "the land makes the people," that is changing despite a host of challenges, from language barriers to decades of broken promises.

Starting in 2018, the exhausted canyon was finally allowed to rest, and a pilot project by Fred Phillips Consulting started restoration work. Fences were erected and livestock relocated. Native plants were reintroduced to restore the riparian area.

Two years later, Fred Phillips Consulting and volunteers from the Navajo Nation Climate Change Program put up more fencing, and they built Zuni bowls and employed other water management techniques to redirect and preserve streamflow.

Tsegi Canyon is just one example of how the Navajo Nation is trying to restore the land and address a climate that's relentlessly heating up and drying out the planet.

Such efforts can be complicated given the intersection of Indigenous knowledge, long-held traditions and a small window of time to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change.

Yet those traditional values and working with indigenous knowledge are a crucial part of limiting climate change, according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its latest assessments of the world's climate.

On the Navajo Nation, efforts to restore Tsegi Canyon are an example of how the people can repair the land but also prepare for climate change.

"Cattle occasionally break in because they see how good the grasses are and how much healthier the streamflow is," Chischilly said. "Our ecological restoration work has enabled the land to heal. It's a testament to giving caring Mother Nature a chance and to rebound if you give her enough time and resources."

It's hard to piece together a timeline of how long the land in Tsegi Canyon has struggled, Chischilly said, but Navajo elders are the best recordkeepers in such issues.

"They are the people with the most useful and available resources in terms of knowing what happens to the land because many of them are farmers and ranchers," Chischilly said. "So just based on that knowledge, it has been the last 30 to 40 years that have most negatively affected the canyon."

Many Navajo elders have the perspective that climate change is a natural cycle, said Keith Howard, another wildlife technician with the tribal Climate Change Program.

"When we tell the story of the Navajo Nation, there were times where the Earth was destroyed by fire or water, but it rejuvenated itself," Howard said. "The animals and people returned. But we're trying to convey that because Earth's population is growing so big and we are consuming so much energy, the human process has outstripped the natural process."

Chischilly and Howard stress that it's a challenge to communicate the idea of rapidly accelerating climate change while helping people maintain their livelihoods, including ranching, while the megadrought continues.

"It's a combination of cultural issues," Chischilly said. "It's a combination of traditional values, a combination of different people's perspectives, Navajo and non-native. And so it gets complicated quickly."

For decades, the Navajo Nation has dealt with severe drought and the ongoing threat of wildfires. With each passing year, Chischilly said, these conditions are getting worse.

"We get verbal accounts of these things going on, like wildlife migrations out of drought-stricken areas," he said. "We're also seeing a lot of young pine and juniper tree die-offs in our nation."

When Navajo work the land, it can get emotional quickly, Chischilly said, because they don't separate themselves from Nahasdzáán - Mother Earth.

"Growing up in a drought-stricken environment, where your parents and grandparents are concerned about feeding livestock, hauling water, and you are introduced to this at a young age, there is little room to be excited or happy," he said. "It wears on the body and soul."

Chischilly said the Navajo Nation Climate Change Program aims to help with this. "We are trying to spark a lot of interest in terms of thinking and acting on climate change differently."

Global conversations happening locally

The Navajo Nation, like many communities across the globe, is having conversations about how to adapt to climate change and how to stave off some of the worst effects of extreme conditions.

These conversations are in line with the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment, which confirms that more extreme weather events are ahead if greenhouse gas emissions aren't drastically reduced.

From 2010 to 2019, average annual greenhouse gas emissions were at their highest level in human history, according to the IPCC report.

Limiting temperature rise to 2.7 degree Fahrenheit is nearly impossible, report authors say, unless greenhouse gas emissions peak before 2025 and emissions are cut by 43% by 2030.

If that isn't achieved, then it will be impossible to go back, said Kathy Jacobs, who directs the Center for Climate Adaptation Science and Solutions at University of Arizona. Cronkite News talked with Jacobs in February after the first report came out.

The IPCC assessment includes solutions and adaptation strategies for climate change. But it also encourages the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge and lived experiences into the efforts.

"But if you're trying to bring the knowledge of the ancestors and the people who have known this land to bear on this topic, while the species that they know may be leaving, that's a pretty big challenge," Jacobs said.

The toll of climate change

Indigenous people across the globe are disproportionately impacted by the effects of climate change, despite contributing very little to the emissions that cause some of its most extreme effects, Jacobs said.

The effects of climate change are being felt in different ways across the 27,673 square mile Navajo Nation, which includes 110 chapters - each one unique, Chischilly said.

"A lot of people are becoming aware of climate change," he said, "but it's so unique here on the reservation because every community has their different issues. In one area, it would be totally devastated by drought and overgrazing. Other areas in the higher elevations are experiencing trees dying off."

The Navajo Nation released its first climate adaptation plan in 2018, after long talks with elders and community members to identify such priorities as addressing drought, pollution and overgrazing.

For the past several years, Howard said, the Navajo Nation Climate Change Program has tried to get on the same page as members about climate change, especially elders and some of the older generations, by bringing awareness about the issue. This process is complicated, especially because many elders only speak Navajo.

"The concept of climate change, ecological restoration and so forth is hard to communicate, especially when there's a language barrier," Howard said. "Many of the concepts, like carbon footprints and greenhouse gasses, are not easily translated into the Dinè Navajo language."

Trust building is at the core of much of the climate program's work.

"A lot of these new techniques, even though they might be relatively low technology and low cost, like just simple erosion control, require buy-in from communities and the acceptance that these techniques work before we can start any implementation at all," Chischilly said.

But despite the sensitivity and challenges, progress is being made.

Drought tour leads to progress

In 2019, Chischilly and Howard began visiting several chapters across the reservation to discuss and educate community members about the impacts of climate change.

They had reached a handful before the COVID-19 pandemic set in, and the Navajo Nation closed. Now, Chischilly said, the tribe is taking its first steps toward restoration projects, based on feedback from a reservation tour last July by Navajo resource and development officials to gauge the effects of drought and overgrazing.

One of the stops was Tsegi Canyon, where the positive impacts of ecological restoration techniques were demonstrated.

"We wanted to educate people about climate change with this tour, but we also wanted to show people tools they can use to adapt," Chischilly said.

But he and Howard said uneasiness remains between the calls from scientists to take immediate action on climate change and the historical trauma Native people have suffered when the government dictates how their lands should be used.

"Not just the Navajo Nation, but native people in general across the United States, we all suffer from transgenerational trauma," Howard said. "In the 1930s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs forcibly removed livestock from our nation. This really impacted our people because that was our way of life. Our elders and our people loved their herds of sheep, cows and horses."

This history, Howard said, makes it hard to bring up the Western scientific concept of a "point of no return" requiring immediate action.

"Many people still carry that experience and trauma with them," he said.

Time, tradition and trust

But Chischilly said the idea of a "point of no return" is making some Navajos more aware of climate change.

"It's difficult to communicate that concept when our lifestyles are at our own pace," Chischilly said. "We have a slower way on the reservation because it's hard to get that immediate buy-in and also immediate implementation, because sometimes that's just not how it works. A lot of people need that trust first."

"When there's no trust and you try to come into a community right off the bat, it's like, 'I don't really know you, I don't trust you yet. Explain this to me.'"

When it comes to making decisions about the environment, Chischilly and Howard said choices around climate change on the Navajo Nation can be extremely personal, especially for elders.

"This involves the heart, our lifestyles and the way we choose to live," Chischilly said. "The land makes the people. That's where we get our identity from as a people. It's born through the environment we live in, the Southwest. So it's not only scientific in talking about the land, it's also talking about emotion, spirituality and faith."

Howard noted a spiritual aspect to addressing climate change. Although it's considered controversial by some Navajo people, he said reintroducing songs, prayers and rituals to reconnect with the Earth, especially among younger generations, will play a large part in addressing climate change in the future.

"Mother Earth is sick and she needs healing," Howard said. "And that healing comes from all these prayers and songs, in addition to our resilience. This word always comes up with Indigenous people who heal from these issues, because climate issues are a sickness. Everything is interconnected. We must treat that healing process as a duty. Resiliency is who we are. But we also need to reclaim it."

Despite the challenges and changes ahead, Howard and Chischilly said they have faith that the Navajo Nation will get through this alongside Indigenous people across the globe through resilience, reconciliation and self-determination.

"A lot of sacrifices will have to be made from ourselves and from our people, but we will be able to address these issues," Chischilly said. "We will find ways to bring our land back in as a self-sustainable ecological system on the Navajo Nation."

Fiona L.Q. Flaherty wrote this article for Cronkite News.


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Business leaders, clean transportation advocates and other experts say new technologies are helping to accelerate the transition to clean trucks and sustainable freight across Pennsylvania. Members of the Clean Trucks Pennsylvania Coalition are calling on federal and state leaders to back programs that support the deployment of clean-power trucks across the Commonwealth.

Jordan Stutt, senior director, northeast region with CALSTART, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing clean transportation solutions, said the goal is to get gas and diesel-powered trucks off the road.

"We are going to take one of the busiest freight corridors in the country, I-95, and turn it into one of the first zero-emission freight corridors in the U.S. That investment and the jobs that it will bring underscore that this transition to clean trucks is all about opportunity," he said.

The coalition is urging Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and state and local leaders to adopt the Advanced Clean Trucks Act. Advocates say the act would reduce emissions by 50% by 2030 and achieve net zero by 2050.

Brooke Petry, field organizer with Moms Clean Air Force of Pennsylvania, said zero-emission trucks are the key to cleaning up the air Pennsylvania families breathe. When residents of South Philadelphia step outside in the morning, the air often has a distinct toxic smell, and she added that toxic air pollution doesn't harm everyone equally.

"Here in Philadelphia, children of color are hospitalized for asthma complications at five times the rate of their white peers. Reducing harmful diesel pollution from trucks is a key component to address climate justice in our city and beyond," she explained.

Erin Johnson, Registered Nurse with the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments, said diesel exhaust is responsible for multiple types of respiratory illnesses and cancers in the region.

"The trucks, buses, trains and port operations that keep goods and services moving through our region also contribute to deadly air pollution. Diesel exhaust contains more than 40 known cancer-causing organic substances. The good news is that we have solutions to this diesel pollution problem," she said.


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Members of the environmental nonprofit GreenLatinos are involved in a push to get more Latinos across Texas involved in the fight against methane gas. Texas is one of the largest producers of the hazardous chemical.

Rogelio Meixueiro, Texas community advocate with GreenLatinos, said a large part of the campaign is educating the community.

"They tell me all the problems that they're experiencing, and the moment I connect with them the fact that there's a fracking site less than a mile away, they start seeing how, 'yeah ever since we moved to this area, we started having breathing problems.' The one that hurts me the most is really the birth defects. Learning that Latino women are some of the most impacted with birth defects is heartening," he explained.

He added that meetings will be held across the state over the next six months, culminating with a final day of action in Austin before the state Legislature.

The organization is forming what they call the Latino Methane Table, to make sure everyone has a seat at the table. Meixueiro said elected officials are passing laws that directly impact the immigrant population, and they hope to give them a voice before the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

"We're seeing how Latinos are constantly affected the most in the agriculture fields, construction. It's so hot, often we don't associate 'oh, methane' - the thing that we are getting out of the Permian - is actually the one that is creating some of the conditions," he explained.

He added the state has a history of being unfair to minorities.

"For Dallas and Fort Worth, what we're noticing is that there's a long history that is tied with redlining. And we notice how often the communities with the most amount of permits approved for fracking - fracking near day-care centers, fracking near homes - it's usually areas where particularly Latino and Black communities live," he continued.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Century of Community-Based Forest Protection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Firefighting Challenges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding a New Funding Model

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Julia Tilton wrote this article for The Daily Yonder.


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