Across the country, you can find small town diners and watering holes proudly displaying photos of a president stopping by on the campaign trail. It’s not only a memento of how the person who got the nuclear codes may have ordered a burger or a slice of rhubarb pie—it’s a reminder of how voters have looked to national candidates’ food and beverage choices as one way to understand if inherently elite politicians are salt of the earth.
In forming her public image, Harris has showcased prowess in the kitchen.
This year, campaign season served up a buffet of food-related happenings and candidate signals, that sometimes, explains University of Buffalo political scientist Jacob Neiheisel, reveal politically salient “boundary markers between groups” and “status anxieties.”
One food gaffe that stands out in history came during incumbent Gerald Ford’s 1976 campaign, when he bit into a tamale in Texas, husk and all, and nearly choked. Such missteps are consequential, Neiheisel says, because it’s “seen as some kind of indicator that they’re out of touch with the electors, that they don’t know the people who they would be representing.”
This year, the closest we’ve come was JD Vance’s stop at Holt’s Sweet Shop, a Florida doughnut seller. His inability to engage the counter staff while standing draped in a suit and a seeming expectation that he’d be recognized—along with his order of “whatever makes sense”—brought national derision. As one succinct YouTube commenter put it, they had “never seen a VP candidate act with less charisma.”
Mountain Dew, also largely thanks to JD Vance, became a token of a certain kind of white manhood, after he, in attempting a jab against overreaching “woke” politics, spoke about drinking a Diet Mountain Dew and how Democrats were for some reason “going to call that racist.” A week later, Democrat vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz proved him wrong by reaffirming his historic love for Diet Dew, telling a voter online that drinking one was the best way to start a morning. In October, the Harris campaign published a video of a blaze orange-bedecked Walz hunting and holding a shotgun, saying he’s looking to “grab a Diet Dew” and “pound one down.” As that guns-and-ammo display suggests, “Diet Mountain Dew has something to say about masculinity,” Contois says, “but also about regionality,” referencing the drink’s “hillbilly”-tied branding and popularity across a so-called “Mountain Dew Belt” spanning parts of Appalachia and rural, middle America.
Despite Walz’s language calling to mind frat basement chugging, the Minnesota governor brings nearly 30 years of sobriety to the ticket. But when Kamala Harris went on Stephen Colbert’s show, the late night host brought up what he called one of the “old saws” of political likability: would I grab a beer with the candidate? (To play along, she was served a can of Miller High Life.)
But when it comes to playing politics with eating and drinking, Harris has largely been focused on letting voters know she likes to cook. That’s no surprise, according to the University of Tulsa’s Emily Contois, who has written that female candidates, in walking “an impossible line” of identity politics, often “navigate voter perceptions of both gender and electability through food and cooking.”
“You have to be masculine enough that they believe you can do the job,” Contois, a professor of media studies, says. “You have to be feminine enough that they think you’re a real woman and a believable one.”
Trump’s campaign bought McDonald’s more than 150 times—there’s no record Harris’ has once.
When Hillary Clinton ran for president, it was against the backdrop of the cultural controversy kicked off by her comments, amid her national introduction during her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign, about how she had prioritized a legal career over staying at home and baking cookies. While men seeking the highest office sometimes seem to relish stuffing their faces on camera, in her 2016 campaign Clinton told the press—during an appearance where she was offered but refused cheesecake—that she had long ago “learned early on not to eat in front of all of you.”
“When it comes to women and food and eating and dieting and bodies,” Contois says, “it becomes a tangled thing.”
In forming her public image, Harris has repeatedly showcased interest and prowess in the kitchen. In her 2020 democratic presidential primary campaign, she ran a video series called “Cooking with Kamala” where she cheffed it up with celebrities, comedians, and politicians. In her speech accepting the party’s vice presidential nomination that year, Contois has written about how, by mentioning cooking Sunday dinner for her family to bolster claim to the nickname of Mamala, Harris sought to “cast herself as politically competent and suitably feminine in the eyes of voters… while also foregrounding her role as a mother and nurturer.”
Contois believes the quirky recipe details shared by Harris on the campaign trail—such as soaking greens in the bathtub—indicates genuineness and true passion, but also a savvy strategy. “It’s coming across as both truth, and a tactic that can help to construct that believably feminine side that people would expect and want to see in a woman,” Contois said.
Harris’ cooking references have become a tool of attack. As Laura Loomer, the right-wing influencer who has spent time on the campaign trail alongside Trump, posted in September, “Kamala spends more time making cooking videos than she does speaking to the media.” Loomer also, in a tradition that traces at least as far back as stigmatizing Italian migrants’ use of garlic, made a smear out of Harris’ Indian heritage and cooking by posting she would make “the White House smell like curry.”
“The spice and the smell and the difference,” Contois says, “that’s a more than 100-year-old tactic … of how to other someone.” An extreme version was also used to target Haitian migrants by the Trump and Vance ticket, in their comments pushing the false notion the community was eating pet dogs and cats. “To eat the family pet—it’s this huge anthropological, cultural taboo,” Contois said. “That’s why the rumor could take root and do so much harm.”
Donald Trump found his own way to use a kitchen to reshape his public image in the campaign’s closing weeks, by making his stage-managed appearance behind a fryer and drive-thru window at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s. It was not only a reminder of his love for the company and fast food generally, but a salvo in his one-sided narrative battle about Harris’ actual experience working at a McDonald’s—one that contrasts with his own silver spoon-fed upbringing.
Harris’ cooking references have become a tool of attack.
Federal Elections Commission campaign spending data shows another clear Trump-Harris contrast related to McDonald’s. While his campaign has paid for food from the home of the Big Mac more than 150 times, there’s no record Harris’ has ordered even once. His team’s second most frequented food business is Dunkin’ Donuts, closely followed by Chick-fil-A, where he has spent over 10 times as much money as Harris. The Harris campaign, since it launched in July, has tended to go big on fast casual spots like Chipotle, where her campaign spent 15 times more than Trump’s, and Sweetgreen, where they spent three times as much as Trump.
Of course, to look beyond symbolism and such spending, the candidates have pushed policies that could affect what and how Americans eat. While Trump loves to blast the rise in cost of groceries, his plan to deport masses of immigrants has been predicted to cause an over 20 percent increase in the price of hand-picked crops while nearly doubling the price of milk. With those kind of stakes, it’s clear this year’s election has left voters with plenty to digest.
Fungi can be enigmatic organisms. Mushrooms or other structures may be visible above the soil, but beneath lurks a complex network of filaments, or hyphae, known as the mycelium. It is even possible for fungi to communicate through the mycelium—despite having no brain.
Other brainless life-forms (such as slime molds) have surprising ways of navigating their surroundings and surviving through communication. Wanting to see whether fungi could recognize food in different arrangements, researchers from Tohoku University and Nagaoka College in Japan observed how the mycelial network of Phanerochaete velutina, a fungus that feeds off dead wood, grew on and around wood blocks arranged in different shapes.
The way the mycelial network spread out, along with its wood decay activity, differed based on the wood block arrangements. This suggests communication because the fungi appeared to find where the most nutrients were and grow in those areas.
© vnosokin
On October 26th, Donald Trump promised that “WHEN I’M PRESIDENT THE MCDONALD’S ICE CREAM MACHINES WILL WORK GREAT AGAIN!” But it is Lina Khan, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, who, earlier today, announced she had actually done something about it.
The day before Trump’s proclamation, the United States Copyright Office announced a new copyright exemption that will grant some small business owners and franchisees—such as those operating the 13,000 McDonald’s in the United States—the “right to repair” the machinery within their own shops. Back in March, the FTC submitted a comment to the US Copyright Office asking to extend the right to repair certain equipment, including commercial soft-serve equipment.
The saga is in miniature a good example of how to potentially combat Trumpism. There is a problem: To many, the McDonald’s soft-serve extruders of this great nation seem perpetually broken (a fact that McDonalds itself has acknowledged). Trump vaguely promised to do something about it. Khan—on the vanguard of a new class of anti-monopolistic Democrats—moved aggressively to try to push a change unpopular with business interests, solve the problem, and get you ice cream more easily.
The new ruling could be a game-changer for drive-through employees, too. They often contend with rageful customers over broken devices. “Victory is sweet,” wrote Elizabeth Chamberlain of iFixIt. “This is a big win—and we’ll be celebrating with ice cream!—but copyright law still needs fixing before we’re free to fix everything we own.”
McDonald’s soft serve machines are manufactured by the Taylor Company. Since 1956, those soft-serve machines could only be legally repaired by Taylor Company licensed technicians—and if anyone without that license attempted to repair the machines, they voided the warranty. That, the FTC said, squashes competition for replacement parts and for repair technicians.
It shows Khan’s knack for proving the government can do things to help make life suck less. And it is a window into how Khan has used the FTC to respond to American grievances.
In 2020, an independent developer scraped data from delivery apps to create a constantly updating map of broken and unbroken ice cream machines. (Called McBroken, it showed that 32 percent of all McDonald’s soft serve machines were out of order at the time of this writing.) In 2021, the FTC launched an inquiry that showed that the broken ice cream machine memes populating the internet contain a grain of truth. When they asked franchisees about the issue, they called the devices overly complicated and hard to fix. In 2023, iFixit, a DIY-focused website and tools retailer, published a breakdown of the machine’s “easily replaceable” parts which frequently break, and which McDonald’s workers were nonetheless forbidden to replace themselves. It seems simple and unspectacular when you lay it out, but the basics are here: hear about a problem, ask why it’s happening, try to find a solution.
Khan has earned a reputation for big moves. She has introduced sweeping crackdowns against companies the FTC considers to be monopolies, such as Amazon, and pushed for consumer-protection interventions like the “click to cancel” rule, designed to make the process of canceling unused gym and magazine subscriptions less arcane. On October 31st, the House Oversight Committee called for her to be replaced, claiming that she is infecting the agency with “left-wing ideology.” Elon Musk tweeted today that “[Khan] will be fired soon.” (Under Musk’s plan for a $2 trillion cut to the federal budget, it’s possible that the FTC would be eliminated entirely.)
Even some Harris-aligned figures, such as billionaires Mark Cuban and Reid Hoffman, have publicly jostled for a less active FTC and to potentially replace Khan.
The ice cream saga may prove why her ways of running the FTC are so valuable.
On October 26th, Donald Trump promised that “WHEN I’M PRESIDENT THE MCDONALD’S ICE CREAM MACHINES WILL WORK GREAT AGAIN!” But it is Lina Khan, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, who, earlier today, announced she had actually done something about it.
The day before Trump’s proclamation, the United States Copyright Office announced a new copyright exemption that will grant some small business owners and franchisees—such as those operating the 13,000 McDonald’s in the United States—the “right to repair” the machinery within their own shops. Back in March, the FTC submitted a comment to the US Copyright Office asking to extend the right to repair certain equipment, including commercial soft-serve equipment.
The saga is in miniature a good example of how to potentially combat Trumpism. There is a problem: To many, the McDonald’s soft-serve extruders of this great nation seem perpetually broken (a fact that McDonalds itself has acknowledged). Trump vaguely promised to do something about it. Khan—on the vanguard of a new class of anti-monopolistic Democrats—moved aggressively to try to push a change unpopular with business interests, solve the problem, and get you ice cream more easily.
The new ruling could be a game-changer for drive-through employees, too. They often contend with rageful customers over broken devices. “Victory is sweet,” wrote Elizabeth Chamberlain of iFixIt. “This is a big win—and we’ll be celebrating with ice cream!—but copyright law still needs fixing before we’re free to fix everything we own.”
McDonald’s soft serve machines are manufactured by the Taylor Company. Since 1956, those soft-serve machines could only be legally repaired by Taylor Company licensed technicians—and if anyone without that license attempted to repair the machines, they voided the warranty. That, the FTC said, squashes competition for replacement parts and for repair technicians.
It shows Khan’s knack for proving the government can do things to help make life suck less. And it is a window into how Khan has used the FTC to respond to American grievances.
In 2020, an independent developer scraped data from delivery apps to create a constantly updating map of broken and unbroken ice cream machines. (Called McBroken, it showed that 32 percent of all McDonald’s soft serve machines were out of order at the time of this writing.) In 2021, the FTC launched an inquiry that showed that the broken ice cream machine memes populating the internet contain a grain of truth. When they asked franchisees about the issue, they called the devices overly complicated and hard to fix. In 2023, iFixit, a DIY-focused website and tools retailer, published a breakdown of the machine’s “easily replaceable” parts which frequently break, and which McDonald’s workers were nonetheless forbidden to replace themselves. It seems simple and unspectacular when you lay it out, but the basics are here: hear about a problem, ask why it’s happening, try to find a solution.
Khan has earned a reputation for big moves. She has introduced sweeping crackdowns against companies the FTC considers to be monopolies, such as Amazon, and pushed for consumer-protection interventions like the “click to cancel” rule, designed to make the process of canceling unused gym and magazine subscriptions less arcane. On October 31st, the House Oversight Committee called for her to be replaced, claiming that she is infecting the agency with “left-wing ideology.” Elon Musk tweeted today that “[Khan] will be fired soon.” (Under Musk’s plan for a $2 trillion cut to the federal budget, it’s possible that the FTC would be eliminated entirely.)
Even some Harris-aligned figures, such as billionaires Mark Cuban and Reid Hoffman, have publicly jostled for a less active FTC and to potentially replace Khan.
The ice cream saga may prove why her ways of running the FTC are so valuable.
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In 2022, fish farms produced an unprecedented 131 million tons of seafood, officially surpassing the global wild-caught fishing industry for the first time, according to a report released in July. Also known as aquaculture, the fish farming sector is often touted as a sustainable way to rapidly scale up the production of crucial fish protein sources without pulling them directly from wild habitats.
But there’s a catch—literally. Some of the main ingredients that farmers feed their fish are, ironically, wild-caught fish. And a new study suggests that the aquaculture industry uses far more wild fish than previously estimated. The research is the latest in a wave of criticism against fish farming, which a group of scientists and conservationists say is fueling environmental degradation.
However, the global demand for fish is expected to skyrocket in the coming decades. Some experts say that despite its shortfalls, aquaculture is improving, and will be a crucial part of the sustainable food supply chain.
While certain species like mussels dine mostly on algae, omnivorous and carnivorous fish require a certain amount of fish in their diets to thrive on farms. To quantify aquaculture’s reliance on wild-caught fish, researchers rely on a seemingly straightforward equation: How much fish goes into the food to produce a certain amount of farmed fish—otherwise known as the “fish-in: fish-out” (FIFO) metric.
In 1997, aquaculturists were using a staggering amount of fish in their feeds to produce relatively low quantities of farmed fish across the board, with a global FIFO of about 1.9, according to a 2021 study. That’s almost two fish in for every fish out, by weight. In some cases, it took as much as 3.16 kilograms of wild-caught fish to produce a single kilogram of salmon. That research found that the FIFO ratio sharply decreased by 2017 as the aquaculture industry sought alternative feed ingredients.
“The metrics used to assess the sustainability of manufacturing aquaculture feed have left out large aspects of its environmental impacts.”
However, there are a variety of ways to calculate this metric. A new study shows how different the results can be if you broaden the definition of the “fish in” side of the equation. Using data from four sources of industry-reported feed composition during 2017, researchers calculated fish inputs to farmed outputs at a range of 0.36 to 1.15. That high end is roughly four times the previous study’s estimate.
One of the main reasons for this discrepancy is that the researchers accounted for several additional factors in their equation, including updated values for fish oil and something called wild fish trimmings. Those are the parts of marine animals’ bodies that are removed during wild-caught fish processing because they are undesirable to many consumers (think heads and tails).
These parts are often used in fish feeds but rarely accounted for in FIFO equations since they are considered waste byproducts. In a separate calculation, the authors also factored in estimates for some of the unintended animal deaths involved in the fishing process, including the accidental catch of non-target species known as bycatch. That pushed the FIFO figures even higher.
“The main recommendation that emerges from the work is to have a closer look at the data,” study co-author Jennifer Jacquet, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science, told me over email. “When that happens what is clear is that the picture is not as rosy as the aquaculture industry or the fishery industry wants us to believe.”
Small fish such as anchovies and sardines are among the main species targeted for aquaculture fishmeal. The issue is that wild animals depend on these fish for food as well. Studies show that depleting these stocks could be particularly bad for seabirds. For example, penguins in Cape Town are declining largely due to the intense fishing pressure on sardines and anchovies, which I wrote about last year.
“One of the take-homes that I really liked of this paper was [its] underscoring that we need better transparency and data availability to really have a good understanding” of the different proportions and species of wild-caught fish being used in aquaculture, said Halley Froehlich, an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies the industry and was not involved in the study.
However, Froehlich noted that the study’s findings may not be as bad for wild ocean fish populations as they seem because the use of fish trimmings in feed is seen by many as a sustainable option.
“It creates a circular economy,” she told me in a phone interview. “Otherwise, [fish trimmings] would just be thrown out.”
The tricky part is that fishers can make additional income selling their trimmings, study author Matthew Hayek, an assistant professor in environmental studies at New York University, told me over email.
This “provides further incentive for fisheries to continue contributing to this value chain,” he said. The study also notes that whole fish from species that are less desirable on the market—dubbed “trash” fish—are sometimes added into that mix as well.
To help mitigate aquaculture’s wild-fish problem, scientists and companies are formulating plant-based alternatives, which have been increasingly integrated into carnivorous fish diets, particularly salmon. This option comes with its own set of risks, according to the new study. For example, they say soy and maize feed options can increase the generation of agricultural-based emissions as well as freshwater consumption.
“Our takeaway is that the metrics used to assess the sustainability of manufacturing aquaculture feed have left out large aspects of its environmental impacts, both at sea and on land,” study author Spencer Roberts, a doctoral student at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School. “These omissions have helped to portray fish and crustacean farming as uniquely efficient or sustainable. Our research shows that it is more similar to other forms of animal farming, albeit with a uniquely high reliance on wild fish extraction.”
Despite these impacts, research shows that our appetite for seafood is expected to double by 2050. As a result, the demand for aquaculture is rising as well. Froehlich stressed that the industry has to find a way to feed fish somehow, and that plant-based or other alternative feeds—particularly microalgae—are the most sustainable options at the moment. In the end, she said, “there is no free lunch.”
One person is dead and 48 others across 10 states have been sickened in an E. coli O157:H7 outbreak that appears to be linked to McDonald's Quarter Pounders and the slivered onions used on the burgers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
McDonald's has paused distribution of the slivered onions and removed Quarter Pounders from the menus of restaurants in areas known to be affected. As of now, those areas include Colorado, Kansas, Utah, and Wyoming, as well as portions of Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.
However, the CDC was quick to note that the size and span of the outbreak are likely larger than is currently known. "This outbreak may not be limited to the states with known illnesses, and the true number of sick people is likely much higher than the number reported," the agency said in its outbreak notice posted Tuesday afternoon.
© Getty | Scott Olson
This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Last October, Aiyana James attended her first water potato harvest on the reservation of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe in northwestern Idaho. The weather was unusually cold, but she was determined to harvest her first water potatoes, a small wetland tuber that’s one of the tribe’s key traditional foods.
The smell of smoke and drying elk meat filled the air along the shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene, where the tribe set up food booths and educational stations. She waded into the frigid water barefoot to dig for the small tubers, while back on land, tribal members cooked them in a traditional pit bake, where elk, camas (a flowering plant with edible bulbs), and other locally harvested foods are layered.
James, who grew up in Portland, Oregon, and spent summers and school breaks on the reservation, was excited to take part in the harvest for the first time after moving to the reservation after college. But something was wrong: Early-season snow dampened the harvest, and although it was only a light dusting, tribal leaders spoke during the opening prayers about how unusual the conditions were. It had been a dry summer, and the water potato harvest was bad, something that has been happening more and more in recent years.
“I know that this isn’t supposed to be how it is,” James said. “Deep down within me, I’m like, ‘This just doesn’t feel right.’”
“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies.”
After their land in northwest Idaho was carved up by 1909 federal allotment policies, Western agriculture, and logging that persists on some level today, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe lost a massive amount of acreage and, with it, their ability to manage the land and maintain balance between environmental protection and economic development. Salmon and trout disappeared from the streams. Fires became more frequent and powerful. Water potatoes and other key plants like camas, once staple foods for tribal members, started to disappear.
Now, extreme drought is making the situation even worse.
All of this is part of a reinforcing cycle of land degradation and climate change that the Coeur d’Alene tribe has been fighting for decades. It’s a fight that James has now joined as one of the tribe’s first climate resilience coordinators.
To protect their land and community, the Coeur d’Alene are in the middle of an ongoing, multidecade effort that relies, in part, on elder knowledge to restore an important wetland.
The tribe is bringing back beavers and salmon, restoring native grasses, and repairing stream channels. Collectively, those efforts are designed to restore balance to the landscape, make it more resilient to future climate change by fostering interconnected ecosystems, and, tribal members hope, one day allow them to rely again on important ancestral foods like the water potato.
“We’ve been living off of the foods that are on our land for thousands upon thousands of years,” James said. “Reconnecting with that food reconnects us with our land.”
Across the country, ecological restoration is increasingly seen as a key part of the fight against climate change, and wetlands provide an especially important service in an era of global warming: They absorb carbon from the atmosphere.
For the Coeur d’Alene tribe, a healthy wetland signifies a way to curb rising temperatures that will provide the basis for the return of a rich food source and a traditional way of life. That a wetland serves as the lynchpin means that the tribe is taking on the restoration of an ecosystem that is especially threatened as the world’s climate trends hotter and more arid. Because wetlands are areas where water is at or near the surface for large parts of the year, severe bouts of drought made more common by climate change threaten their existence.
According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, more than half of the wetlands in the lower 48 states are gone, and the rate of loss is only accelerating. Between 2009 and 2019, an area of vegetated wetlands in the US the combined size of Rhode Island disappeared.
“You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.”
There’s an overarching effort underway to help these imperiled landscapes. The 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $1.4 billion for ecosystem restoration and resilience, while President Joe Biden also signed an executive order setting a national goal to conserve at least 30 percent of the country’s lands and waters by 2030.
The Coeur d’Alene aren’t alone in their focus on restoration, but they’re especially good at it. And their uniquely patient, humble approach could serve as a model for other communities working to restore the environment and prepare for climate change.
Tribal knowledge and expertise is especially important for restoration because Indigenous people are the ones who know what the land was like before it was degraded and what techniques will help restore it. The thread that ties it all together is traditional food, like the water potato. These cultural foods build connections between people and land and act as an especially tangible measuring stick of the impact that those connections can have on the environment.
James says that camas, for example, grows better when it is regularly harvested. But because so much Coeur d’Alene land is now owned by non-Indigenous people, tribal members often don’t have access to camas fields, and some that have been unattended for years are now suffering.
“We need these foods, but they also need us to flourish and to grow and get better,” she said. “If we do these things right and we focus on restoring our relationship and restoring our connection with our culture, sovereignty, and traditions, then that’s going to have lasting effects.”
On the Coeur d’Alene reservation, soil health and biodiversity have declined, the water temperature is rising, and extreme weather like heat waves and drought are increasingly frequent. But the tribe’s restoration work is beginning to pay off.
In the summer of 2022, an adult salmon swam in Hangman Creek for the first time in around 100 years. Two years after the tribe released juvenile salmon into the creek, and after an arduous journey out to the Pacific Ocean and back, the tribe welcomed salmon back to the creek for the first time in generations.
For Ralph Allan Jr., the tribe’s fish and wildlife program manager, it was the culmination of 20 years of work that began with long days of fieldwork like planting trees. Now, he’s leading the department as it prepares to bring salmon back to the reservation.
Allan is also working to plant the seeds for a new generation of restoration advocates. He has led an internship program to get college students out in the field and three tribal members are currently enrolled in fish and wildlife degree programs. At the water potato harvest, Allan makes sure that department staff are working with the youth, showing them how to harvest the potatoes and pulling the kids out of the mud when they get stuck.
This cultural and community work is part of the tribe’s restoration effort. Allan worries that the tribe’s younger generation is not as connected to the land as he was growing up. “We’re not just reintroducing the species of salmon back to our people,” he said. “We’ve lost that cultural connection to the salmon as well, so we’re reintroducing a whole culture of salmon.”
While salmon are a priority, they are just one piece of a complicated, interconnected ecosystem the tribe is working to restore. Take beaver dams. Dams raise the water table, extend the area along the banks of a river or lake that more animals and plants can inhabit, and keep more water on the landscape. All of this makes the area more welcoming to salmon and other wildlife, but also makes the landscape more resilient to drought and extreme heat because wetlands absorb and retain water that is released during drier periods, explains Tyler Opp, the tribe’s wetlands coordinator.
“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies.”
The beaver dams also support clean, cold-water habitats for salmon, but to do that, they need trees. Since 2019, the tribe’s environmental programs department has planted over 18,000 trees from about a dozen different species, and plans to plant another 4,000 by 2025.
The tribe has used beaver dam analogs—man-made approximations—to encourage beavers to return and posts to reinforce existing beaver dams. Gerald Green, a wildlife biologist for the tribe, says they are currently supporting about seven beaver dams in the creek.
Trees, beavers, salmon, water—they’re all part of a cyclical, interdependent system the tribe is trying to restore and support. Cajetan Matheson, natural resource director and a tribal council member, says that addressing climate impacts or restoration goals one by one will not work. “Everything is really related to each other,” Matheson said. “You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.”
These projects take time. Tyler Opp says that even though the scale of the work that needs to be done can be overwhelming, the tribe’s approach helps keep things in perspective.
By keeping longer-term goals in mind, like bringing salmon back, which could take decades, the tribe avoids Band-Aid solutions. The whole tribal government buys into this approach, year after year and generation to generation, and although the tribe is limited by funding and capacity, like many public agencies, this commitment allows them to focus on projects that will contribute to achieving that long-term vision. Despite the constraints, the tribe can unify behind a shared vision of the future, based on their collective history, knowledge, and appreciation for the land.
“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies,” he said. “The tribe doesn’t have to think in terms of the next budget cycle for getting work done. All of [the things we are doing] are done for future generations.”
Almost everyone I talked to in the Natural Resources Department credits that perspective to Felix Aripa, a tribal elder who died in 2016. He is seen as instrumental in setting the tone for the tribe’s restoration work.
Even Aiyana James, who never had the chance to meet him, says she’s listened to old tapes of Aripa. He was an early proponent of using beavers as a restoration partner and helped with things as straightforward as pointing out where a stream used to flow so that the technicians could use that as a guideline to restore the course rather than starting from scratch or guesswork. “The ultimate goal for anybody that works here in the Fish and Wildlife Program is to leave a legacy the way that Felix Aripa left his legacy and his mark on the program,” Allan said.
Before he passed away, Aripa helped Matheson and others put the tribe’s traditional seasonal calendar on paper. The calendar, which is based on seasonal indicators like tree sap rather than months and days, includes detailed information about foods, ecosystems, plants, animals, and human activities. “As we’re thinking broadly about how we approach restoration, it’s the framework that we can use,” Laura Laumatia, the tribe’s environmental programs manager, said. “It represents millennia of knowledge.”
So while the tribe is proud of their progress, they are still working for the future. “I think it’s nice to work for 20 years in the same place because you do see some changes happening,” Laumatia said. “But we know that the fruits of our labor are really going to be 70 years from now.”
This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Last October, Aiyana James attended her first water potato harvest on the reservation of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe in northwestern Idaho. The weather was unusually cold, but she was determined to harvest her first water potatoes, a small wetland tuber that’s one of the tribe’s key traditional foods.
The smell of smoke and drying elk meat filled the air along the shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene, where the tribe set up food booths and educational stations. She waded into the frigid water barefoot to dig for the small tubers, while back on land, tribal members cooked them in a traditional pit bake, where elk, camas (a flowering plant with edible bulbs), and other locally harvested foods are layered.
James, who grew up in Portland, Oregon, and spent summers and school breaks on the reservation, was excited to take part in the harvest for the first time after moving to the reservation after college. But something was wrong: Early-season snow dampened the harvest, and although it was only a light dusting, tribal leaders spoke during the opening prayers about how unusual the conditions were. It had been a dry summer, and the water potato harvest was bad, something that has been happening more and more in recent years.
“I know that this isn’t supposed to be how it is,” James said. “Deep down within me, I’m like, ‘This just doesn’t feel right.’”
“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies.”
After their land in northwest Idaho was carved up by 1909 federal allotment policies, Western agriculture, and logging that persists on some level today, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe lost a massive amount of acreage and, with it, their ability to manage the land and maintain balance between environmental protection and economic development. Salmon and trout disappeared from the streams. Fires became more frequent and powerful. Water potatoes and other key plants like camas, once staple foods for tribal members, started to disappear.
Now, extreme drought is making the situation even worse.
All of this is part of a reinforcing cycle of land degradation and climate change that the Coeur d’Alene tribe has been fighting for decades. It’s a fight that James has now joined as one of the tribe’s first climate resilience coordinators.
To protect their land and community, the Coeur d’Alene are in the middle of an ongoing, multidecade effort that relies, in part, on elder knowledge to restore an important wetland.
The tribe is bringing back beavers and salmon, restoring native grasses, and repairing stream channels. Collectively, those efforts are designed to restore balance to the landscape, make it more resilient to future climate change by fostering interconnected ecosystems, and, tribal members hope, one day allow them to rely again on important ancestral foods like the water potato.
“We’ve been living off of the foods that are on our land for thousands upon thousands of years,” James said. “Reconnecting with that food reconnects us with our land.”
Across the country, ecological restoration is increasingly seen as a key part of the fight against climate change, and wetlands provide an especially important service in an era of global warming: They absorb carbon from the atmosphere.
For the Coeur d’Alene tribe, a healthy wetland signifies a way to curb rising temperatures that will provide the basis for the return of a rich food source and a traditional way of life. That a wetland serves as the lynchpin means that the tribe is taking on the restoration of an ecosystem that is especially threatened as the world’s climate trends hotter and more arid. Because wetlands are areas where water is at or near the surface for large parts of the year, severe bouts of drought made more common by climate change threaten their existence.
According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, more than half of the wetlands in the lower 48 states are gone, and the rate of loss is only accelerating. Between 2009 and 2019, an area of vegetated wetlands in the US the combined size of Rhode Island disappeared.
“You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.”
There’s an overarching effort underway to help these imperiled landscapes. The 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $1.4 billion for ecosystem restoration and resilience, while President Joe Biden also signed an executive order setting a national goal to conserve at least 30 percent of the country’s lands and waters by 2030.
The Coeur d’Alene aren’t alone in their focus on restoration, but they’re especially good at it. And their uniquely patient, humble approach could serve as a model for other communities working to restore the environment and prepare for climate change.
Tribal knowledge and expertise is especially important for restoration because Indigenous people are the ones who know what the land was like before it was degraded and what techniques will help restore it. The thread that ties it all together is traditional food, like the water potato. These cultural foods build connections between people and land and act as an especially tangible measuring stick of the impact that those connections can have on the environment.
James says that camas, for example, grows better when it is regularly harvested. But because so much Coeur d’Alene land is now owned by non-Indigenous people, tribal members often don’t have access to camas fields, and some that have been unattended for years are now suffering.
“We need these foods, but they also need us to flourish and to grow and get better,” she said. “If we do these things right and we focus on restoring our relationship and restoring our connection with our culture, sovereignty, and traditions, then that’s going to have lasting effects.”
On the Coeur d’Alene reservation, soil health and biodiversity have declined, the water temperature is rising, and extreme weather like heat waves and drought are increasingly frequent. But the tribe’s restoration work is beginning to pay off.
In the summer of 2022, an adult salmon swam in Hangman Creek for the first time in around 100 years. Two years after the tribe released juvenile salmon into the creek, and after an arduous journey out to the Pacific Ocean and back, the tribe welcomed salmon back to the creek for the first time in generations.
For Ralph Allan Jr., the tribe’s fish and wildlife program manager, it was the culmination of 20 years of work that began with long days of fieldwork like planting trees. Now, he’s leading the department as it prepares to bring salmon back to the reservation.
Allan is also working to plant the seeds for a new generation of restoration advocates. He has led an internship program to get college students out in the field and three tribal members are currently enrolled in fish and wildlife degree programs. At the water potato harvest, Allan makes sure that department staff are working with the youth, showing them how to harvest the potatoes and pulling the kids out of the mud when they get stuck.
This cultural and community work is part of the tribe’s restoration effort. Allan worries that the tribe’s younger generation is not as connected to the land as he was growing up. “We’re not just reintroducing the species of salmon back to our people,” he said. “We’ve lost that cultural connection to the salmon as well, so we’re reintroducing a whole culture of salmon.”
While salmon are a priority, they are just one piece of a complicated, interconnected ecosystem the tribe is working to restore. Take beaver dams. Dams raise the water table, extend the area along the banks of a river or lake that more animals and plants can inhabit, and keep more water on the landscape. All of this makes the area more welcoming to salmon and other wildlife, but also makes the landscape more resilient to drought and extreme heat because wetlands absorb and retain water that is released during drier periods, explains Tyler Opp, the tribe’s wetlands coordinator.
“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies.”
The beaver dams also support clean, cold-water habitats for salmon, but to do that, they need trees. Since 2019, the tribe’s environmental programs department has planted over 18,000 trees from about a dozen different species, and plans to plant another 4,000 by 2025.
The tribe has used beaver dam analogs—man-made approximations—to encourage beavers to return and posts to reinforce existing beaver dams. Gerald Green, a wildlife biologist for the tribe, says they are currently supporting about seven beaver dams in the creek.
Trees, beavers, salmon, water—they’re all part of a cyclical, interdependent system the tribe is trying to restore and support. Cajetan Matheson, natural resource director and a tribal council member, says that addressing climate impacts or restoration goals one by one will not work. “Everything is really related to each other,” Matheson said. “You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.”
These projects take time. Tyler Opp says that even though the scale of the work that needs to be done can be overwhelming, the tribe’s approach helps keep things in perspective.
By keeping longer-term goals in mind, like bringing salmon back, which could take decades, the tribe avoids Band-Aid solutions. The whole tribal government buys into this approach, year after year and generation to generation, and although the tribe is limited by funding and capacity, like many public agencies, this commitment allows them to focus on projects that will contribute to achieving that long-term vision. Despite the constraints, the tribe can unify behind a shared vision of the future, based on their collective history, knowledge, and appreciation for the land.
“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies,” he said. “The tribe doesn’t have to think in terms of the next budget cycle for getting work done. All of [the things we are doing] are done for future generations.”
Almost everyone I talked to in the Natural Resources Department credits that perspective to Felix Aripa, a tribal elder who died in 2016. He is seen as instrumental in setting the tone for the tribe’s restoration work.
Even Aiyana James, who never had the chance to meet him, says she’s listened to old tapes of Aripa. He was an early proponent of using beavers as a restoration partner and helped with things as straightforward as pointing out where a stream used to flow so that the technicians could use that as a guideline to restore the course rather than starting from scratch or guesswork. “The ultimate goal for anybody that works here in the Fish and Wildlife Program is to leave a legacy the way that Felix Aripa left his legacy and his mark on the program,” Allan said.
Before he passed away, Aripa helped Matheson and others put the tribe’s traditional seasonal calendar on paper. The calendar, which is based on seasonal indicators like tree sap rather than months and days, includes detailed information about foods, ecosystems, plants, animals, and human activities. “As we’re thinking broadly about how we approach restoration, it’s the framework that we can use,” Laura Laumatia, the tribe’s environmental programs manager, said. “It represents millennia of knowledge.”
So while the tribe is proud of their progress, they are still working for the future. “I think it’s nice to work for 20 years in the same place because you do see some changes happening,” Laumatia said. “But we know that the fruits of our labor are really going to be 70 years from now.”
When Hurricane Milton rapidly intensified last week, exploding into a Category 5 storm, large parts of Florida were bracing for disaster. For Cruz Salucio, Milton wouldn’t be the first, or the worst, hurricane he’d endured. But it sparked anxiety all the same.
Salucio works for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ local radio station, Radio Conciencia. The organization primarily serves farmworkers in Southern Florida, but its various programs have a presence in 15 states around the country.
When hurricanes like Milton, Idalia, and Ian have approached, Salucio and other radio DJs were often the most direct source of reliable, fact-checked information for the region’s Spanish- and Mayan-speaking migrant workers. Climate change is intensifying these types of storms and in the process straining resources, endangering millions of people. For workers with few resources, hurricanes can be isolating and devastating events. But Radio Conciencia tries to fill the gaps as much as possible.
People at the station often answer questions about shelters and evacuation routes. Amid the deluge of information and misinformation, Radio Conciencia has become a trusted resource for many. It helps that, when there’s not a crisis, the station plays traditional genres of music like Banda, a regional Mexican style originally influenced by polka, or marimba-centric music popular in Guatemala. It also supplements the music with messages about workers’ rights and safety, filling a vital knowledge gap.
Salucio spoke with me, via translation, about what it feels like to provide a lifesaving resource in trying times. His story has been edited and condensed for clarity:
I remember when I first came to Immokalee trying to find a radio station to listen to. Scrolling through the dial, I came across the music that was playing on Radio Conciencia. It was a Sunday, and I remember hearing marimba, which is a traditional Guatemalan instrument, and also hearing the radio host speaking in Q’anjob’al, an Indigenous language from Guatemala. It was so striking to me at that moment to hear not only the music, but also my first language, and to have that direct connection to where I had just come from.
From there, I got really involved. I came to Radio Conciencia because it’s a community radio station. You yourself can get involved and learn how to speak on radio and manage it technologically.
When I was working in the fields back in the 2000s, you’ll often have this experience where the bosses on a particular farm want to get as much harvested as possible, quickly, before the hurricane arrives. They’ll wait till the very last minute to let people leave. Having that experience myself—that’s really what drives me.
When I’m sitting and broadcasting from the radio during these moments of crisis, where I know that members of the community, their lives and their wellbeing are in danger, it feels incredibly important to make sure they know that. I feel a profound commitment to the radio and its purpose, especially in those moments, to the point that, especially now that I have a family, there’s that kind of balancing act of being home with family and sometimes needing to get back to the office to record some last-minute audio tracks or be live on the radio.
Our goal is always to ensure that people have the information they need when they need it, that they know how to prepare for these types of crises, and, especially during a hurricane, to know where they can go to shelter.
Days ahead of a hurricane’s arrival, we will work on original announcements that we can program with important information about what to do, how to prepare, how to stay safe during and after. We’ll record and program those announcements to play to everyone periodically, so even if there’s not someone live in the station, those messages are still getting out there. And of course the other limitation is if power goes out. That does affect the radio but we try to be as prepared as possible for those eventualities.
The good news is that our radio station and community center are in quite a safe building. Even during this most recent hurricane [Milton], some of our staff and radio DJs actually sheltered and stayed here, so they were able to continue broadcasting. We’re safer here than they might have been in their homes.
The main thing we hear from listeners during these times is just deep gratitude. A lot of people in the community, by phone and on social media, reach out to say thank you for having a place they can go to in their language that has good and reliable information, that isn’t creating panic. They will call us and say, “I live in a really crappy trailer and I don’t feel safe—where can I go? Where are the shelters?”
These storms not only impact the community but will wipe out entire agricultural fields. So they’ll call and say, “Have you heard anything? Do you know what’s happened in the tomato fields?”
“I’ve gone to the public shelters as well…It’s actually kind of a beautiful scene sometimes, and a good place to connect with the community and chat with people and see how everyone’s doing.”
Sometimes we’ll give them the terrible news that the entire fields got wiped out, which means no work. It always depends on the nature of the storm. For this particular storm, we could tell, basically in the final hours before the storm, that it wasn’t going to hit as hard here. So I sheltered at home with my family. The worst of it did not come inland to Immokalee.
During other hurricanes, when I’ve lived in trailers and other insecure housing, I’ve gone to the public shelters not only to be safe myself, but it’s actually kind of a beautiful scene sometimes, and a good place to connect with the community and chat with people and see how everyone’s doing.
The reality for so many farmworkers is, especially when you’re living in trailers and really poor housing, you have so little and you are afraid of losing the little you do have of your belongings. Some people try to ride it out in their housing. Or they’re afraid that if they leave and then come back, what are they going to come back to? It might be nothing. Ideally, people will go when they need to, find a shelter to be safe if it’s going to be an extreme storm—even with that fear of losing everything they have.
Correction, Oct. 18, 2024: This story was corrected to accurately reflect the number of states where the Coalition of Immokalee workers has programs.
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