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Southern Black Farmers Sow Rice and Reconciliation

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Tuesday, December 17, 2024

In the heart of Louisiana, about 100 miles north of Baton Rouge, lies the rain-soaked farm that lured Konda Mason away from California in 2020. Reflecting on her journey to the South, the entrepreneur and spiritual teacher has no regrets about relocating from Oakland to the small city of Alexandria to start growing rice. She chuckles while explaining how she got there: in an RV with two loved ones and two dogs. But a hint of frustration creeps into her voice when she talks about the weather. Planting the Seeds of JusticeThis article is part of our ongoing series, Planting the Seeds of Justice, in which we focus on the connections between climate, health, soil health, and equity for farmers of color. Read all the stories in this series: A Black-Led Agricultural Community Takes Shape in Maryland An urban farm trailblazer begins building a Black agrarian corridor in rural Maryland, fostering community and climate resilience. Land access was the first step. Southern Black Farmers Sow Rice and Reconciliation Jubilee Justice grows rice regeneratively while reclaiming the past. “Right now, it’s too wet for us to get into the field with a tractor,” she explained the night after a thunderstorm this summer. “We’ve had very few days where we can go into the field so far this year, and that is problematic.” Mason is the founder of Jubilee Justice, a nonprofit that helps small-holder Black farmers in the South grow specialty rice with the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), a “dry-land” method developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead of growing rice in flooded paddies to prevent weeds from overtaking the crop, SRI farmers treat rice like a vegetable, irrigating it as needed and using other weed control methods. “What we’re doing [at Jubilee Justice] is reclaiming rice and rice farming as our foodways, as our invention, as our birthright—and in that is nothing but the spirit of the ancestors.” Created on Madagascar and practiced in about 60 countries today, SRI has been shown to increase grain yields, sometimes twofold. The method also tackles the significant climate impact of conventional rice production. Methane emissions created by flooded rice paddies account for about 10 percent of global agricultural emissions. That’s because so much rice is grown around the world: Roughly 11 percent of all arable land is devoted to this crop, a daily staple for half the people on Earth. Per calorie, though, rice produces fewer emissions than most staple foods, including meat, fish, eggs, dairy, and even other grains like wheat and corn. And growing rice with SRI can cut those emissions nearly in half. (Rice has other issues, namely that it can contain high amounts of arsenic, depending on the variety and where it’s grown; however, rice grown under drier conditions, like SRI, likely has less arsenic.) Despite all the advantages of SRI, it’s scarcely practiced in the U.S. because it requires specialized equipment, involves a lot more labor, and is extremely difficult to pull off. “That’s why people think we’re crazy,” Mason said. But she has powerful reasons to focus on rice despite the challenges. For Mason, rice represents a way to transform lives and reclaim the past, offering a path toward racial, economic, and climate justice. A Flow of Knowledge Jubilee Justice’s rice program, called the Black Farmers Cohort, currently consists of 10 farmers from Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Kentucky. Collectively, they cultivate seven different varieties, including the organization’s signatures: “Black Joy,” “Creole Country Red,” “Black Belt Sticky,” and “Jubilee Justice Jasmine.” The team in Alexandria is testing 20 more varieties at their 17-acre farm, located on a former cotton plantation that serves as the central research hub for crop and equipment trials. Mason notes that knowledge flows out as much as it flows in, because everyone is learning. At the Jubilee Justice farm in Alexandria, Louisiana, rice is farmed with a “dry-land” method called System of Rice Intensification (SRI). (Photo courtesy of Jubilee Justice) “We are basically figuring it out year by year,” explained Erika Styger, director of the Climate-Resilient Farming Systems Program at Cornell University. A leading provider of SRI technical assistance to small-holder farmers worldwide, Styger has been a Jubilee Justice advisor since the Black Farmers Cohort began in 2019. Jublilee Justice is the only organization in the U.S. “actively implementing and systematically researching the [SRI] method organically, regeneratively, and in collaboration with multiple farmers,” she said. Essentially, these farmers are the vanguards of a grand Southern experiment—part of what makes their work so challenging. SRI can take years to adjust to a single farming operation and microclimate, Styger said, and having farmers around who have already done it successfully and can share their wisdom minimizes a “difficult” and “fragile” learning period. Being the first ones to pursue SRI on U.S. soil, Jubilee Justice doesn’t have this option. “It takes a lot of knowledge and fine-tuning, and you need to be ready to adapt to different situations,” she added. Styger thinks the growing pains are worth it, though: “In the long run, of course, you’re building a much-improved system that will be able to withstand climate change much better.” With SRI, farmers can cut by half the typical 800 to 5,000 liters of water used to grow one kilogram of rice, resulting in a 43 percent reduction in methane emissions, according to a brief by Styger and her Cornell colleague Norman Uphoff. While SRI may slightly increase nitrous oxide emissions, Styger and Uphoff found its advantages outweigh the potential downsides: SRI has been shown to lower the global warming potential of rice production by 25 percent on average. Caryl Levine, co-founder of Lotus Foods, a California-based company specializing in SRI with farmers in Asia and Southeast Asia, says dryland rice farming is gaining popularity because “it’s much more regenerative” than conventional flooding. Still, it’s taken decades for the practice to spread. Lotus Foods primarily works with farmers overseas, but teamed up with Mason to work on bringing Jubilee Justice rice to market. “It was a long-term goal of Lotus Foods to work with domestic farmers who are willing to use SRI practices,” Levine has said. With as many challenges as successes these past four years, the Black Farmers Cohort has yet to meet the volume threshold for Lotus to put their rice on grocery store shelves. Mason remains optimistic, though, saying, “We’re getting there.” In November, her farm in Alexandria achieved a milestone by harvesting its first full acre of rice after three years of smaller trials, marking their best harvest yet. Jubilee Justice supplies farmers who are a part of the Black Farmers Cohort with everything they need to get started with SRI, including seeds, equipment, minerals, fertilizers, labor support, and technical assistance. In addition to funding from small family foundations, the organization received a $500,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 2021. MacArthur described the organization as “transformative,” providing support to “Black farming communities through new models of regenerative farming, cooperative ownership, and access to new markets by restoring and accelerating Black land ownership to create generational wealth.” Honoring Their Ancestors Mason started forming the Black Farmers Cohort and bringing in a network of experts to ensure their success about eight months before she left California. She’d already had multiple careers, managing a Grammy-nominated musician, producing an Academy Award-nominated film, and founding a co-working space in downtown Oakland, Impact Hub, an incubator for entrepreneurs, creatives, and environmentally conscious organizations. Jubilee Justice Specialty Foods co-op members. Top row, left to right: James Coleman, Roy Mosley, Hilery Gobert, Collie Graddick, and CJ Fields. Bottom row, left to right: Jose Gonzalez, Konda Mason, Bernard Singleton, and visiting farmer Rodney Mason (not a member of the co-op). (Photo courtesy of Jubilee Justice) Mason’s choice to focus on rice was an intentional nod to America’s intertwined racial, economic, and environmental histories: Around the end of the 17th century, before “king cotton” blanketed Southern fields, American colonists in the South Carolina Lowcountry recognized the potential to profit from cultivating rice along coastal waterways. “But the American colonists had no experience with the cultivation of rice, and they needed African slaves who knew how to plant, harvest, and process this difficult crop,” writes anthropologist Joseph A. Opala. The colonists set their sights on the peoples of Africa’s “Rice Coast,” from present-day Senegal down to Liberia, who had developed sophisticated rice cultivation systems. Opala says plantation owners were willing to pay higher prices for dragging these expert farmers across the Atlantic into North American slavery. Over two centuries, hundreds of thousands of acres were cleared to establish rice plantations, shaping the Southern economy and landscape. “After emancipation, Black folks left and walked away from our birthright to be rice farmers,” said Mason. “What we’re doing [at Jubilee Justice] is reclaiming rice and rice farming as our foodways, as our invention, as our birthright—and in that is nothing but the spirit of the ancestors.” Even the name Jubilee Justice suggests reclamation and restoration. Mason was inspired by the “Jubilee Year,” referenced in the Bible, signifying a cycle that occurred every 50 years when “land that was taken goes back to its original owner, debts are forgiven, and people who have been enslaved are set free,” said Mason. “It’s a year of reboot and equity and justice.” Challenges of a Changing Climate Louisiana is known for being a wet state, but this year’s unusually long and rainy spring prevented Mason’s team from planting rice until summer, putting their young crops at risk of wilting in the field. Across the Black Farmers Cohort, many attribute their climate challenges to relentless rains and intense heat. In 2023, Louisiana got so hot that its governor declared a state of emergency. “It’s like the spigot turned off, which was the rain, and the heat turned up,” said Donna Isaacs, who runs Campti Field of Dreams, a nonprofit with a 43-acre organic farm in Campti, Louisiana. “You would walk on what was supposed to be grass and you heard crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. That’s how bad it was last year.” Most of Campti’s land is dedicated to livestock, including sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens, while 2.5 acres are reserved for vegetables. (The farm is working toward organic certification.) Only a fraction of the land, around a quarter acre, is devoted to rice. Isaacs had never grown rice before meeting Mason and thought the crop was a money suck. “My understanding of rice at the time was, you were only getting a few cents per pound, so growing it was not cost-effective,” Isaacs explained in her Jamaican accent. When Mason told Isaacs there was no financial outlay to join the Black Farmers Cohort, it was easier for her to take a chance on rice. Isaacs’ face lit up as she reminisced about their “amazing” first harvest of four varieties. Last year was different, though: Campti lost most of its rice crops to drought and heat. Half their livestock died, too. This spring, they encountered the opposite problem, facing the same cold and wet conditions as Mason’s team, which left them unable to plant rice at all. In Richmond, Kentucky, near the foothills of Appalachia, cohort member Brian Chadwell had no trouble planting rice this year. But he’s been battling heat and weeds ever since. Chadwell lost about half of his rice crops to weeds last year, which was Kentucky’s fourth warmest on record. State climatologist Jerry Brotzge told Civil Eats that Kentucky is on track to surpass that record this year. Chadwell dreams of establishing a wholly organic SRI operation. For now, he’s reluctantly laying plastic mulch and spraying Roundup to suppress weeds. He’s learned how to make gradual shifts in his operation with guidance from Jubilee Justice and his idol, Nazirahk Amen of Purple Mountain Organics, a Louisiana-born farmer and naturopathic doctor living in Takoma Park, Maryland. Amen isn’t part of the Black Farmers Cohort because he’d been growing rice regeneratively for years by the time Jubilee Justice got started. Still, he faces some of the same challenges. He anticipates that of the 1.5 acres he devoted to growing rice this year, approximately 80 percent of his red rice and 20 percent of another variety will be lost to blast, a fungal disease he says is worsened by the drought conditions his region experienced this summer. “Like, why do I farm?” Amen said, laughing. “At some point, I was telling people that I feel like [the biblical character] Job. Like, I don’t know what else could go wrong.” Driven by the healing power of nutritious food for his family and patients, Amen continues doing what farmers do best: adapting. “We’re not doing true SRI,” Amen said about Purple Mountain Organics. “We’re doing practical SRI.” He’s adjusted some of the principles to make the system work for him. At one point, he imported two combines from Japan specifically designed for rice. “They have a system of production that we don’t have [in the U.S.],” he noted, pointing out that their combines are well-suited to SRI because their plant spacing is similar to the 25-x-25-centimeter spacing that SRI recommends, giving plants more space to grow. When Mason visited Amen in 2021 to learn about his operation, he sold her one of his combines and delivered it personally. “I’m so grateful,” Mason said. “He saved my life.” Experience has taught Amen that it’s advantageous to diversify his crops so that if one fails, another might thrive. (He was pleased to hear that the Black Farmers Cohort is doing the same; they’re currently experimenting with red wheat, black corn, indigo, and more.) But given the overall risks involved in specialty rice farming, he believes the only way to survive is to account for losses by raising consumer pricing. “I don’t think it’s possible for farmers to do this below $6 or $8 or $10 a pound—even in the South,” he said. Drying rice at the Jubilee Justice mill, November 2024. (Photo courtesy of Jubilee Justice) Despite the losses Isaacs experienced, she estimates that her farm in Campti could save $10,000 a month by growing SRI rice and other grains they can use in livestock feed. Building up soil health and improving its water-holding capacity to better withstand climate events will be an added benefit. “What started out as a quarter of an acre of rice may end up becoming 10 acres twice a year,” Isaacs said. To avoid potential barriers to planting next year, the Campti team is planting cover crops early and building new infrastructure—investments that she estimates will cost over $20,000 and incalculable sweat equity. Rice, Racism, and Repair Many Black farmers face challenges in securing the credit essential for operating their farms, let alone preparing for climate-related disasters. Barriers to owning, operating, and modernizing farmland date back over a century. In 1910, Black farmers were 14 percent of the U.S. farming population but account for only 1.4 percent today. Black farmers lost 90 percent of their land between 1910 and 1997, due to a combination of racial terrorism, forced property sales, and discriminatory USDA policies that the agency has said were “designed to benefit those with access, education, assets, [and] privilege rather than for those without.” All that acreage, most of which was in the South, is worth roughly $326 billion today, according to a 2022 study. Recent federal efforts to repair this history of anti-Black harm have faced backlash, with claims of discrimination against white farmers. In response, Congress opened discrimination payments to farmers of all racial backgrounds. In July, the USDA announced it had distributed about $2 billion to more than 40,000 farmers who endured past discrimination. To date, the agency has not shared what percentage of these payments went to Black farmers, although more than half of the recipients were in Mississippi and Alabama, states that boast the largest populations of Black agricultural producers. In many ways, the Black Farmers Cohort became a reality through an act of reparations. Recognizing that Black farmers are often under-resourced and need forms of capital beyond what Jubilee Justice provides, Mason and Mark Watson, former managing director of the Fair Food Fund, co-founded a sister organization called Potlikker Capital in 2020. Potlikker Capital provides grants and loans meant to “nourish farmers, not to be extractive,” as Mason put it. (A potlikker recipe in a cookbook by her friend, the renowned chef Bryant Terry, inspired the name.) According to Watson, Potlikker invests in rural Black, Indigenous, and farmers of color through a mix of grants, loans, and equity. Instead of making decisions based on credit scores or tax returns, Potlikker takes a “relational” and “holistic” approach to funding by visiting farmers regularly and building relationships with them, reviewing their business plans, and making introductions to distributors and lawyers “to create more supportive ecosystems for BIPOC farmers to thrive,” Watson said. In many ways, the Black Farmers Cohort became a reality through an act of reparations. During an earlier Jubilee Justice program called “Our Ancestral Journey,” Mason crossed paths with Elisabeth Keller, whose family owns the former plantation in Alexandria that now serves as the Jubilee Justice headquarters. Their relationship deepened over the course of the two-year program, which brought together people from different backgrounds to delve into their genealogical roots and reimagine capitalism, “healing backwards in order to heal forward,” as noted in an annual report. Mason and Keller found an affinity in the work they wanted to do: Keller had transformed part of the plantation into an organic farm but hadn’t figured out how to “heal the land” from the trauma inflicted on the enslaved peoples and sharecroppers who’d labored there. When Mason came up with the idea for the Black Farmers Cohort and was still looking for a place to begin, she remembers Keller saying, “Konda, bring Jubilee Justice here to this land.” Farmer Donna Isaacs, part of Jubilee Justice’s Black Farmers Cohort, with harvested rice at her farm in Campti, Louisiana, August 2021. (Photo courtesy of Donna Isaacs) Jubilee Justice recently expanded its initial lease from 5 acres to 17, which now includes Elisabeth Keller’s organic farm. In 2022, the Keller family gave the organization the deed to a piece of land with a building that now houses the first cooperatively Black-owned rice mill in the U.S., enabling Black farmers to cut out middlemen and own their means of production. Mason’s journey bears a striking resemblance to that of Charley Bordelone West, the mill founder in the television series Queen Sugar, though the show predates Jubilee Justice. (It’s worth noting that Natalie Baszile, who wrote Queen Sugar, is now on Mason’s board of directors.) Like Bordelone, Mason is out to build a durable model of Black self-determination. Taking a break at the mill during the busy November harvest, Mason voiced her fatigue after an equipment failure left her team to manually process 3,000 pounds of rice by spreading it out on tarps and using fans and rakes to dry it. It was the fourth day of grueling shifts, and her weary eyes reflected both exhaustion and pride in the farmers’ accomplishments. The cohort was scheduled to arrive the following week to decide on their path forward. Despite the rollercoaster nature of their startup journey, Mason felt invigorated by their progress. “There’s so many people waiting for the rice—and nobody more so than me,” said Mason. “I’m hoping that we’ll get all the channels that are available to us.” Mason stressed that Jubilee Justice is not a project but a legacy, meant to live beyond her. “This is not about me. It’s not about condemnation . . . This is justice work and healing work.” For Mason, producing rice organically and regeneratively, with Black farmers in the South, goes beyond climate action. Rice is a conduit for honoring ancestral practices and the long-existing bond Black people have with “the land and earth and interconnectedness of all life,” she said. “Nobody can take that away.” The post Southern Black Farmers Sow Rice and Reconciliation appeared first on Civil Eats.

“Right now, it’s too wet for us to get into the field with a tractor,” she explained the night after a thunderstorm this summer. “We’ve had very few days where we can go into the field so far this year, and that is problematic.” Mason is the founder of Jubilee Justice, a nonprofit that helps […] The post Southern Black Farmers Sow Rice and Reconciliation appeared first on Civil Eats.

In the heart of Louisiana, about 100 miles north of Baton Rouge, lies the rain-soaked farm that lured Konda Mason away from California in 2020. Reflecting on her journey to the South, the entrepreneur and spiritual teacher has no regrets about relocating from Oakland to the small city of Alexandria to start growing rice. She chuckles while explaining how she got there: in an RV with two loved ones and two dogs. But a hint of frustration creeps into her voice when she talks about the weather.

Planting the Seeds of Justice

This article is part of our ongoing series, Planting the Seeds of Justice, in which we focus on the connections between climate, health, soil health, and equity for farmers of color.

Read all the stories in this series:

“Right now, it’s too wet for us to get into the field with a tractor,” she explained the night after a thunderstorm this summer. “We’ve had very few days where we can go into the field so far this year, and that is problematic.”

Mason is the founder of Jubilee Justice, a nonprofit that helps small-holder Black farmers in the South grow specialty rice with the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), a “dry-land” method developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead of growing rice in flooded paddies to prevent weeds from overtaking the crop, SRI farmers treat rice like a vegetable, irrigating it as needed and using other weed control methods.

“What we’re doing [at Jubilee Justice] is reclaiming rice and rice farming as our foodways, as our invention, as our birthright—and in that is nothing but the spirit of the ancestors.”

Created on Madagascar and practiced in about 60 countries today, SRI has been shown to increase grain yields, sometimes twofold. The method also tackles the significant climate impact of conventional rice production. Methane emissions created by flooded rice paddies account for about 10 percent of global agricultural emissions. That’s because so much rice is grown around the world: Roughly 11 percent of all arable land is devoted to this crop, a daily staple for half the people on Earth.

Per calorie, though, rice produces fewer emissions than most staple foods, including meat, fish, eggs, dairy, and even other grains like wheat and corn. And growing rice with SRI can cut those emissions nearly in half. (Rice has other issues, namely that it can contain high amounts of arsenic, depending on the variety and where it’s grown; however, rice grown under drier conditions, like SRI, likely has less arsenic.)

Despite all the advantages of SRI, it’s scarcely practiced in the U.S. because it requires specialized equipment, involves a lot more labor, and is extremely difficult to pull off. “That’s why people think we’re crazy,” Mason said.

But she has powerful reasons to focus on rice despite the challenges. For Mason, rice represents a way to transform lives and reclaim the past, offering a path toward racial, economic, and climate justice.

A Flow of Knowledge

Jubilee Justice’s rice program, called the Black Farmers Cohort, currently consists of 10 farmers from Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Kentucky. Collectively, they cultivate seven different varieties, including the organization’s signatures: “Black Joy,” “Creole Country Red,” “Black Belt Sticky,” and “Jubilee Justice Jasmine.” The team in Alexandria is testing 20 more varieties at their 17-acre farm, located on a former cotton plantation that serves as the central research hub for crop and equipment trials. Mason notes that knowledge flows out as much as it flows in, because everyone is learning.

A large swath of land filled with young green rice stalks with barns in the background and a blue sky

At the Jubilee Justice farm in Alexandria, Louisiana, rice is farmed with a “dry-land” method called System of Rice Intensification (SRI). (Photo courtesy of Jubilee Justice)

“We are basically figuring it out year by year,” explained Erika Styger, director of the Climate-Resilient Farming Systems Program at Cornell University. A leading provider of SRI technical assistance to small-holder farmers worldwide, Styger has been a Jubilee Justice advisor since the Black Farmers Cohort began in 2019.

Jublilee Justice is the only organization in the U.S. “actively implementing and systematically researching the [SRI] method organically, regeneratively, and in collaboration with multiple farmers,” she said. Essentially, these farmers are the vanguards of a grand Southern experiment—part of what makes their work so challenging.

SRI can take years to adjust to a single farming operation and microclimate, Styger said, and having farmers around who have already done it successfully and can share their wisdom minimizes a “difficult” and “fragile” learning period. Being the first ones to pursue SRI on U.S. soil, Jubilee Justice doesn’t have this option.

“It takes a lot of knowledge and fine-tuning, and you need to be ready to adapt to different situations,” she added. Styger thinks the growing pains are worth it, though: “In the long run, of course, you’re building a much-improved system that will be able to withstand climate change much better.”

With SRI, farmers can cut by half the typical 800 to 5,000 liters of water used to grow one kilogram of rice, resulting in a 43 percent reduction in methane emissions, according to a brief by Styger and her Cornell colleague Norman Uphoff. While SRI may slightly increase nitrous oxide emissions, Styger and Uphoff found its advantages outweigh the potential downsides: SRI has been shown to lower the global warming potential of rice production by 25 percent on average.

Caryl Levine, co-founder of Lotus Foods, a California-based company specializing in SRI with farmers in Asia and Southeast Asia, says dryland rice farming is gaining popularity because “it’s much more regenerative” than conventional flooding. Still, it’s taken decades for the practice to spread.

Lotus Foods primarily works with farmers overseas, but teamed up with Mason to work on bringing Jubilee Justice rice to market. “It was a long-term goal of Lotus Foods to work with domestic farmers who are willing to use SRI practices,” Levine has said. With as many challenges as successes these past four years, the Black Farmers Cohort has yet to meet the volume threshold for Lotus to put their rice on grocery store shelves. Mason remains optimistic, though, saying, “We’re getting there.” In November, her farm in Alexandria achieved a milestone by harvesting its first full acre of rice after three years of smaller trials, marking their best harvest yet.

Jubilee Justice supplies farmers who are a part of the Black Farmers Cohort with everything they need to get started with SRI, including seeds, equipment, minerals, fertilizers, labor support, and technical assistance. In addition to funding from small family foundations, the organization received a $500,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 2021.

MacArthur described the organization as “transformative,” providing support to “Black farming communities through new models of regenerative farming, cooperative ownership, and access to new markets by restoring and accelerating Black land ownership to create generational wealth.”

Honoring Their Ancestors

Mason started forming the Black Farmers Cohort and bringing in a network of experts to ensure their success about eight months before she left California. She’d already had multiple careers, managing a Grammy-nominated musician, producing an Academy Award-nominated film, and founding a co-working space in downtown Oakland, Impact Hub, an incubator for entrepreneurs, creatives, and environmentally conscious organizations.

A group of Black rice farmers in the South who are using a dry farming method.

Jubilee Justice Specialty Foods co-op members. Top row, left to right: James Coleman, Roy Mosley, Hilery Gobert, Collie Graddick, and CJ Fields. Bottom row, left to right: Jose Gonzalez, Konda Mason, Bernard Singleton, and visiting farmer Rodney Mason (not a member of the co-op). (Photo courtesy of Jubilee Justice)

Mason’s choice to focus on rice was an intentional nod to America’s intertwined racial, economic, and environmental histories: Around the end of the 17th century, before “king cotton” blanketed Southern fields, American colonists in the South Carolina Lowcountry recognized the potential to profit from cultivating rice along coastal waterways.

“But the American colonists had no experience with the cultivation of rice, and they needed African slaves who knew how to plant, harvest, and process this difficult crop,” writes anthropologist Joseph A. Opala. The colonists set their sights on the peoples of Africa’s “Rice Coast,” from present-day Senegal down to Liberia, who had developed sophisticated rice cultivation systems.

Opala says plantation owners were willing to pay higher prices for dragging these expert farmers across the Atlantic into North American slavery. Over two centuries, hundreds of thousands of acres were cleared to establish rice plantations, shaping the Southern economy and landscape.

“After emancipation, Black folks left and walked away from our birthright to be rice farmers,” said Mason. “What we’re doing [at Jubilee Justice] is reclaiming rice and rice farming as our foodways, as our invention, as our birthright—and in that is nothing but the spirit of the ancestors.”

Even the name Jubilee Justice suggests reclamation and restoration. Mason was inspired by the “Jubilee Year,” referenced in the Bible, signifying a cycle that occurred every 50 years when “land that was taken goes back to its original owner, debts are forgiven, and people who have been enslaved are set free,” said Mason. “It’s a year of reboot and equity and justice.”

Challenges of a Changing Climate

Louisiana is known for being a wet state, but this year’s unusually long and rainy spring prevented Mason’s team from planting rice until summer, putting their young crops at risk of wilting in the field. Across the Black Farmers Cohort, many attribute their climate challenges to relentless rains and intense heat. In 2023, Louisiana got so hot that its governor declared a state of emergency.

“It’s like the spigot turned off, which was the rain, and the heat turned up,” said Donna Isaacs, who runs Campti Field of Dreams, a nonprofit with a 43-acre organic farm in Campti, Louisiana. “You would walk on what was supposed to be grass and you heard crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. That’s how bad it was last year.”

Most of Campti’s land is dedicated to livestock, including sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens, while 2.5 acres are reserved for vegetables. (The farm is working toward organic certification.) Only a fraction of the land, around a quarter acre, is devoted to rice. Isaacs had never grown rice before meeting Mason and thought the crop was a money suck. “My understanding of rice at the time was, you were only getting a few cents per pound, so growing it was not cost-effective,” Isaacs explained in her Jamaican accent.

When Mason told Isaacs there was no financial outlay to join the Black Farmers Cohort, it was easier for her to take a chance on rice. Isaacs’ face lit up as she reminisced about their “amazing” first harvest of four varieties. Last year was different, though: Campti lost most of its rice crops to drought and heat. Half their livestock died, too. This spring, they encountered the opposite problem, facing the same cold and wet conditions as Mason’s team, which left them unable to plant rice at all.

In Richmond, Kentucky, near the foothills of Appalachia, cohort member Brian Chadwell had no trouble planting rice this year. But he’s been battling heat and weeds ever since. Chadwell lost about half of his rice crops to weeds last year, which was Kentucky’s fourth warmest on record. State climatologist Jerry Brotzge told Civil Eats that Kentucky is on track to surpass that record this year.

Chadwell dreams of establishing a wholly organic SRI operation. For now, he’s reluctantly laying plastic mulch and spraying Roundup to suppress weeds. He’s learned how to make gradual shifts in his operation with guidance from Jubilee Justice and his idol, Nazirahk Amen of Purple Mountain Organics, a Louisiana-born farmer and naturopathic doctor living in Takoma Park, Maryland.

Amen isn’t part of the Black Farmers Cohort because he’d been growing rice regeneratively for years by the time Jubilee Justice got started. Still, he faces some of the same challenges. He anticipates that of the 1.5 acres he devoted to growing rice this year, approximately 80 percent of his red rice and 20 percent of another variety will be lost to blast, a fungal disease he says is worsened by the drought conditions his region experienced this summer.

“Like, why do I farm?” Amen said, laughing. “At some point, I was telling people that I feel like [the biblical character] Job. Like, I don’t know what else could go wrong.”

Driven by the healing power of nutritious food for his family and patients, Amen continues doing what farmers do best: adapting. “We’re not doing true SRI,” Amen said about Purple Mountain Organics. “We’re doing practical SRI.” He’s adjusted some of the principles to make the system work for him.

At one point, he imported two combines from Japan specifically designed for rice. “They have a system of production that we don’t have [in the U.S.],” he noted, pointing out that their combines are well-suited to SRI because their plant spacing is similar to the 25-x-25-centimeter spacing that SRI recommends, giving plants more space to grow. When Mason visited Amen in 2021 to learn about his operation, he sold her one of his combines and delivered it personally. “I’m so grateful,” Mason said. “He saved my life.”

Experience has taught Amen that it’s advantageous to diversify his crops so that if one fails, another might thrive. (He was pleased to hear that the Black Farmers Cohort is doing the same; they’re currently experimenting with red wheat, black corn, indigo, and more.) But given the overall risks involved in specialty rice farming, he believes the only way to survive is to account for losses by raising consumer pricing. “I don’t think it’s possible for farmers to do this below $6 or $8 or $10 a pound—even in the South,” he said.

Drying rice at the Jubilee Justice mill, November 2024. (Photo courtesy of Jubilee Justice)

Despite the losses Isaacs experienced, she estimates that her farm in Campti could save $10,000 a month by growing SRI rice and other grains they can use in livestock feed. Building up soil health and improving its water-holding capacity to better withstand climate events will be an added benefit. “What started out as a quarter of an acre of rice may end up becoming 10 acres twice a year,” Isaacs said. To avoid potential barriers to planting next year, the Campti team is planting cover crops early and building new infrastructure—investments that she estimates will cost over $20,000 and incalculable sweat equity.

Rice, Racism, and Repair

Many Black farmers face challenges in securing the credit essential for operating their farms, let alone preparing for climate-related disasters. Barriers to owning, operating, and modernizing farmland date back over a century.

In 1910, Black farmers were 14 percent of the U.S. farming population but account for only 1.4 percent today. Black farmers lost 90 percent of their land between 1910 and 1997, due to a combination of racial terrorism, forced property sales, and discriminatory USDA policies that the agency has said were “designed to benefit those with access, education, assets, [and] privilege rather than for those without.” All that acreage, most of which was in the South, is worth roughly $326 billion today, according to a 2022 study.

Recent federal efforts to repair this history of anti-Black harm have faced backlash, with claims of discrimination against white farmers. In response, Congress opened discrimination payments to farmers of all racial backgrounds. In July, the USDA announced it had distributed about $2 billion to more than 40,000 farmers who endured past discrimination. To date, the agency has not shared what percentage of these payments went to Black farmers, although more than half of the recipients were in Mississippi and Alabama, states that boast the largest populations of Black agricultural producers.

In many ways, the Black Farmers Cohort became a reality through an act of reparations.

Recognizing that Black farmers are often under-resourced and need forms of capital beyond what Jubilee Justice provides, Mason and Mark Watson, former managing director of the Fair Food Fund, co-founded a sister organization called Potlikker Capital in 2020. Potlikker Capital provides grants and loans meant to “nourish farmers, not to be extractive,” as Mason put it. (A potlikker recipe in a cookbook by her friend, the renowned chef Bryant Terry, inspired the name.)

According to Watson, Potlikker invests in rural Black, Indigenous, and farmers of color through a mix of grants, loans, and equity. Instead of making decisions based on credit scores or tax returns, Potlikker takes a “relational” and “holistic” approach to funding by visiting farmers regularly and building relationships with them, reviewing their business plans, and making introductions to distributors and lawyers “to create more supportive ecosystems for BIPOC farmers to thrive,” Watson said.

In many ways, the Black Farmers Cohort became a reality through an act of reparations. During an earlier Jubilee Justice program called “Our Ancestral Journey,” Mason crossed paths with Elisabeth Keller, whose family owns the former plantation in Alexandria that now serves as the Jubilee Justice headquarters. Their relationship deepened over the course of the two-year program, which brought together people from different backgrounds to delve into their genealogical roots and reimagine capitalism, “healing backwards in order to heal forward,” as noted in an annual report.

Mason and Keller found an affinity in the work they wanted to do: Keller had transformed part of the plantation into an organic farm but hadn’t figured out how to “heal the land” from the trauma inflicted on the enslaved peoples and sharecroppers who’d labored there. When Mason came up with the idea for the Black Farmers Cohort and was still looking for a place to begin, she remembers Keller saying, “Konda, bring Jubilee Justice here to this land.”

A Black woman rice farmer wearing a straw hat holds a basket of recently harvest rice stalks

Farmer Donna Isaacs, part of Jubilee Justice’s Black Farmers Cohort, with harvested rice at her farm in Campti, Louisiana, August 2021. (Photo courtesy of Donna Isaacs)

Jubilee Justice recently expanded its initial lease from 5 acres to 17, which now includes Elisabeth Keller’s organic farm. In 2022, the Keller family gave the organization the deed to a piece of land with a building that now houses the first cooperatively Black-owned rice mill in the U.S., enabling Black farmers to cut out middlemen and own their means of production.

Mason’s journey bears a striking resemblance to that of Charley Bordelone West, the mill founder in the television series Queen Sugar, though the show predates Jubilee Justice. (It’s worth noting that Natalie Baszile, who wrote Queen Sugar, is now on Mason’s board of directors.) Like Bordelone, Mason is out to build a durable model of Black self-determination.

Taking a break at the mill during the busy November harvest, Mason voiced her fatigue after an equipment failure left her team to manually process 3,000 pounds of rice by spreading it out on tarps and using fans and rakes to dry it. It was the fourth day of grueling shifts, and her weary eyes reflected both exhaustion and pride in the farmers’ accomplishments.

The cohort was scheduled to arrive the following week to decide on their path forward. Despite the rollercoaster nature of their startup journey, Mason felt invigorated by their progress. “There’s so many people waiting for the rice—and nobody more so than me,” said Mason. “I’m hoping that we’ll get all the channels that are available to us.”

Mason stressed that Jubilee Justice is not a project but a legacy, meant to live beyond her. “This is not about me. It’s not about condemnation . . . This is justice work and healing work.”

For Mason, producing rice organically and regeneratively, with Black farmers in the South, goes beyond climate action. Rice is a conduit for honoring ancestral practices and the long-existing bond Black people have with “the land and earth and interconnectedness of all life,” she said. “Nobody can take that away.”

The post Southern Black Farmers Sow Rice and Reconciliation appeared first on Civil Eats.

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This Is What Forecasters Mean When They Talk About a 100-Year Flood

Weather forecasts sometimes warn of storms that can unleash such unusual rainfall that they are described as 100-year or even 500-year floods

Weather forecasters sometimes warn of storms that unleash such unusual rain they are described as 100-year or even 500-year floods. Here’s what to know about how scientists determine how extreme a flood is and how common these extreme events are becoming. What does a 100-year flood mean? Scientists use math to help people understand how unusual a severe flood is and how to compare the intensity of one flood to another. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, one statistic scientists use is the percentage chance that a flood of a specific magnitude will happen. A 500-year flood means such an event has a 1 in 500 chance, or 0.2%, of occurring in a year. Another concept scientists use is how frequently an event of a certain intensity is expected. For example, a meteorologist can look at the average recurrence interval of an anticipated flood and see that a similar event is only expected once every 25 years.Agencies have preferred expressing the percent chance of a flood occurring rather than the recurrence interval because that statistic better represents the fact that rare floods can happen within a few years of each other. It's sort of like rolling a pair of dice and getting double six's twice in a row. It's rare, but statistically possible. Another term people hear during an impending flood is that it could be a once-in-a-generation or once-in-a-lifetime event, a casual way of saying a flood could be unlike anything many people have experienced. How flooding is changing with the climate Researchers from the University of Chicago calculated that Houston, Texas, was struck by three 500-year flood events within 24 months from 2015 through 2017. The events included Hurricane Harvey, the heaviest recorded rainfall ever in the U.S. Homes and businesses were destroyed and cars were swept away by the floods.Although math can calculate how often to expect floods of specific magnitudes, nature has its own plans, including irregularity. Many interconnected systems in the environment, such as local weather patterns and larger events like El Nino, can contribute to the changing likelihood of floods. Since the early 1900s, precipitation events have become heavier and more frequent across most of the U.S. and flooding is becoming a bigger issue, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Gases emitted by humans, like carbon dioxide and methane, are warming the atmosphere, allowing it to hold more water vapor. For every 1 degree of Fahrenheit that the temperature warms, the atmosphere can hold nearly 4% more water, which is a 7% increase for every 1 degree Celsius, said Victor Gensini, professor of atmospheric sciences at Northern Illinois University. That vapor eventually falls back to the ground as rain or snow. “We’ve absolutely seen a shift in the probability distribution of heavy rainfall over the last three decades,” Gensini said. Other regions have experienced drought due to changing precipitation patterns. According to NASA, major droughts and periods of excessive precipitation have been occurring more frequently. Globally, the intensity of extreme wet and dry events is closely linked to global warming. ___Seth Borenstein contributed to this report from Washington, D.C. The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

UK housebuilders ‘very bad’ at building houses, says wildlife charity CEO

Land speculation to blame for lack of progress amid Labour drive to build 1.5m new homes, says Wildlife Trusts headUK politics live – latest updatesBusiness live – latest updatesHousebuilders in the UK are failing to supply much-needed new homes not because of restrictive planning laws, but because they are “very bad” at building houses, the head of one of the UK’s biggest nature charities has warned.“There’s planning permission today for a million new houses,” said Craig Bennett, chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts. “So why aren’t they being built? Why is it that volume housebuilders in this country are actually very bad at building houses, even when they’ve got planning permission?” Continue reading...

Housebuilders in the UK are failing to supply much-needed new homes not because of restrictive planning laws, but because they are “very bad” at building houses, the head of one of the UK’s biggest nature charities has warned.“There’s planning permission today for a million new houses,” said Craig Bennett, chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts. “So why aren’t they being built? Why is it that volume housebuilders in this country are actually very bad at building houses, even when they’ve got planning permission?”Ministers have boasted of their swingeing reforms to the planning system – in a bill that passed its second reading last week – claiming they will clear the way for the 1.5m new homes promised in the Labour manifesto.But Bennett believes this hope will be in vain because the government is missing the point. “[The reason so few homes are built] is because they [the large housebuilders] love to hold land and wait for the prices to up. A lot of the way that a lot of housebuilders in this country make money is through speculation around land prices, as much as it is about building houses.”Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, and Keir Starmer, the prime minister, have overhauled the planning system to make housebuilding easier. Photograph: Joe Giddens/PAHousebuilders rejected Bennett’s analysis. Steve Turner, an executive director of the Home Builders Federation, said: “Housebuilders deliver a range of high-quality environmentally friendly house types to meet all budgets, and customer satisfaction levels are at an all time high. The myth of land banking has been demolished time and again by independent experts. Housebuilders’ only return on investment is selling homes, and having purchased land and navigated the costly and bureaucratic planning process there is absolutely no reason not to build and sell.”Bennett will mark five years in April as head of the Wildlife Trusts, a confederation of 46 independent organisations which together boast 2,600 nature reserves (“about 1,000 more than McDonald’s has restaurants”) and 944,000 members. Before that, he headed Friends of the Earth.The Wildlife Trusts, as a charity, are careful to avoid being party political, but within Charity Commission guidelines there is still scope for civil society groups to take issue with the politicians of the day.And planning regulation – and the supposed conflict between development and environmental protection – has become a political flashpoint. Green groups have accused the Labour government of “scapegoating” nature and fomenting culture wars, after Rachel Reeves, chancellor of the exchequer, called for businesses to “focus on getting things built, and stop worrying about the bats and the newts”. The prime minister, Keir Starmer, has also weighed in, ridiculing the presence of “the distinguished jumping spider” for allegedly halting new homes in Kent.Government criticism of environmental protection may be partly based on a wish to establish an enemy, says Bennett. Photograph: Alamy/PAThe government’s combative rhetoric has been informed, Bennett believes, not by careful consideration of the UK’s infrastructural deficits, but by a mixture of a “misinformation bubble”, in which top ministers have absorbed some prejudices of the previous Conservative government, and a belief that they need to set up an enemy to fix on.Reeves was sounding “more Liz Truss than Liz Truss” on the growth issue, he added, referring to the former Tory prime minister who espoused anti-green rhetoric more often heard from US rightwing politicians. He blames Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s chief adviser, for a fixation on the Reform party, which threatens Labour in seats across the “red wall”.Reform’s leaders, Nigel Farage and Richard Tice, have been vitriolic in their condemnation of environmentalists, green concerns over nature and “stupid net zero”, as described by Tice. But Bennett pointed to a survey of 4,000 people’s attitudes towards green issues, which found that Labour voters who were thinking of switching to Reform were overwhelmingly positive towards the Wildlife Trusts. “There’s a lot of the kind of Reform voters who care passionately about this. People who live in the Westminster bubble assume that what the party leadership are doing is what the voters are doing. It’s quite different.”Building work in Ebbsfleet Garden City, Kent, which the prime minister said was being held back by wildlife concerns. Photograph: Neil Hall/EPAHe has extended invitations to Farage, Tice and the Reform party to meet and discuss these issues. So far, they have not been taken up.Bennett argues that new housing could sit alongside nature, if housebuilders were given greater direction by the government and built affordable homes instead of the larger and more expensive “executive” homes that deliver higher profits. But he said the poor construction of many new houses, and the failure of developers to build in harmony with nature and incorporate green space, were among the reasons people rejected them.Bennett added that charities such as the Wildlife Trusts create economic growth while improving society. “We’re now employing 3,700 people across the UK in those communities,” he said. “I get a bit fed up at times when politicians talk about charities as if we’re just like small little things. We are actually really significant employers.” Bennett added that in many areas, wildlife charities “underpin the local economy”, providing tourism opportunities, flood management and employment.Labour disparages nature at its peril, Bennett said, arguing that all voters care about nature on their doorstep. He said: “I see people from every demographic, political [party] or age. The one thing that unites us is how much we care about our local environment, and care about local nature, and want to see it in a better state.”

L.A. issues first rebuilding permits as fire recovery accelerates

The initial round of federal cleanup finished in record time, and experts say the permitting process appears to be outpacing other blazes as well.

PACIFIC PALISADES, California — Ben and Ellie Perlman were standing on the roof of their two-story house, watching the blaze barrel toward their neighborhood, when they made the decision.No matter what happens, they promised each other, we’re going to rebuild.Subscribe for unlimited access to The PostYou can cancel anytime.SubscribeIt was an abstract commitment. Flames had not yet swallowed the new house they had moved into just nine months earlier. They hadn’t seen their Pacific Palisades block entirely leveled. And they hadn’t fully reckoned with what it would mean to start over.But 2½ months after the Los Angeles firestorms, the Perlmans are following through on their rooftop resolution. They are poised to be among the first group of families to receive rebuilding permits and break ground, a milestone moment in the timeline of disaster recovery.“Now that the house burned down, it hasn’t changed our resolve,” Ben Perlman said. “This is our community, this is our home and we’re committed to it.”The first batch of permits comes as officials here have prioritized speed in response to the unprecedented disaster, which spawned fires that destroyed more than 16,000 structures across Los Angeles County in January. The initial round of federal cleanup finished in record time, and experts say the permitting process appears to be outpacing other incidents as well.Follow Climate & environmentThe city so far has green-lit the rebuilding of four properties in the Palisades, an affluent neighborhood near the Pacific Ocean, and has more — including the Perlmans’ — in the pipeline, days away from final approval. Lawmakers in Los Angeles County, which issues permits for parcels outside city limits, including the heavily affected community of Altadena, say they expect their first applications to be granted soon.The progress signals the beginning of a new, important phase.“The first permit is a sign of the road back,” said Jennifer Gray Thompson, founder and chief executive of After the Fire, a nonprofit that helps communities navigate rebuilding. “Now, instead of being in response mode, you’re starting toward a new tide coming in — one of hope and recovery that gains momentum. You can’t have momentum without a first.”‘Follow me’After moving from the East Coast and bouncing around a few neighborhoods in the area, the Perlmans finally settled in the Alphabet Streets district of the Palisades. They walked their Yorkie to the coffee shop most mornings and enrolled their 2-year-old daughter in a local temple’s early-childhood program.“We felt safe, we felt respected,” said Ben Perlman, who runs corporate strategy for his family’s retail business. “It’s hard to put a pin in it and explain exactly what that feeling is, but it felt good. It felt like home.”Within days of finding out their house burned, they had contacted their contractor to discuss rebuilding plans.“I don’t think they hesitated for a minute,” said Oran Belillti, owner of Ortam Construction, which built the five-bedroom, 4,100-square-foot modern home that the Perlmans moved into last year.Because they had recently built their home and opted to reuse the already approved plans, the Perlmans’ postfire application was fast-tracked under emergency state and city orders.They began submitting their paperwork in mid-February and less than a month later received word that their permit was in the final stage of the process — a progression that was roughly four times faster than when they first built the house. They’re now awaiting a final inspection of their cleared-off lot and hope to begin construction soon.What comes next is far less certain.Unsettled debates about the future of infrastructure in the area — whether the local utility will move power lines underground, for example — could eventually delay rebuilding work. And even once the house is finished, there’s still the matter of moving back: Will the surrounding area still be littered with toxic fire remains? Will the rest of the neighborhood transform into an active construction zone?“There are many more questions than answers right now,” Perlman said. “But I feel it’s important for somebody to step out into that void and say, ‘I’m going to figure it out. We are building, follow me.’”Perlman helped launch 1Pali, a grassroots group focused on facilitating in-person gatherings for the fire-scattered community. He wants to lead by example. If others see his family rebuilding, he hopes, maybe they’ll follow suit.“There are a lot of people who are still on the fence,” said Belillti, the builder. “If they see that, wow, there’s already a house going up in the Alphabet Streets, I think they’re going to say, ‘Well, if that guy can do it, we can start to do it, too.’”Across the street from the Perlmans, Jeff Scruton is also moving forward. The 44-year resident of the Palisades decided to choose from a list of preapproved architectural plans rather than rebuild his home as it was — another option for residents whose homes were not built recently but who are still hoping to expedite the process. His builder expects to begin work in October and finish a year later. Scruton was heartened to hear of the Perlmans’ progress.“The more people who are doing that,” he said, “the better.”‘A wicked problem’In Paradise, a northern California town almost completely destroyed in the 2018 Camp Fire, staff in the Building Resiliency Center still ring a bell and cheer for every new permit issued.In the local vernacular, residents celebrate whenever they see the frame of a house “go vertical,” rising from the foundation and beginning to take shape. Nearly 19,000 structures burned, most of them homes.“I will see a home go vertical and it changes what my street looks like,” said Jen Goodlin, the executive director of Rebuild Paradise, a nonprofit that supports the town’s recovery. “It takes away from the devastated look. That burned-out empty-looking space now has something in it.”For Los Angeles, places like Paradise contain messages from the future. On the surface, the two couldn’t be more different — an international metropolis in one of the country’s most populous regions and a remote town in the mountain foothills — but residents of both now know what it’s like to see their community burn. And more than six years into recovery, those in Paradise know what it takes to move back.“Someone has to be willing to take the step,” Goodlin said. “Not only does it give hope, it creates camaraderie. It doesn’t matter who your neighbors are, if they choose to come back to an area that’s disaster-impacted, you have this common ground. It breaks down all these barriers between humans.”Los Angeles issued its first rebuilding permit on March 5, just 57 days after fires broke out in the Palisades and Altadena.Elected leaders in California and Los Angeles have been under intense local and federal pressure to oversee a rapid rebuild, and they have faced criticism from some who say their approach has been scattered and disjointed.Traci Park, a Los Angeles city council member, said at a recent meeting that the number of permits issued so far “doesn’t seem like very many” and that the city risks “losing our audience if we make this any harder for people.”It’s difficult to compare disasters, since each one occurs in a specific local context, but Los Angeles’s early pace is, despite the scrutiny, significantly faster than four recent major fires analyzed by the Urban Institute, a public policy think tank.Paradise issued its first permit 78 days after the fire, though progress plateaued in subsequent months. In Shasta County, California, it took 91 days following the Carr Fire. In suburban Denver, 95 days elapsed after the Marshall Fire. And on Maui, it took 267 days for officials to approve the first permit after fires razed much of Lahaina in 2023. After one year, the study shows, none of the jurisdictions had approved permits for more than a third of affected houses.Officials in L.A. seem to have “responded well to lessons learned in other places,” said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and co-author of the fire rebuilding analysis. Policies mandating expedited permitting and lifting certain environmental regulations signal a focus on moving quickly, Rumbach said.The key, he added, will be balancing speed with deliberation, so that the process is equitable for all impacted Angelenos and minimizes displacement.Thompson, of After the Fire, said every community must define its own measurements of a successful rebuild. If Los Angeles carries on at its current pace, 80 percent of residents could return in about five years, she estimated. She has visited both fire zones three times and said the region could be the model of recovery.“It’s the land of doers, of producers, of organizers,” Thompson said.In the Palisades, Perlman visits his block at least once a week. The last of his lot’s debris was removed Friday. It is now blank slate. He’s done an informal survey of his neighbors and found that nearly everyone is committed to rebuilding.His family feels fortunate to have the means to return, and Perlman said the community must support residents who are underinsured, who might struggle to come back. Some of those displaced include retirees without the assets to cover the gap between insurance and reality; others had no insurance and could be forced to sell.Rebuilding is “a wicked problem,” he said — full of complexity and challenges. But in conversations with others, he’s trying to keep focused on the big picture: “We want to rebuild, we want to get back into our houses as soon as possible,” he said. “We can’t lose sight of that.”At the family’s rental home in Brentwood, the Perlmans’ 2-year-old talks about everything she misses: her toys, her bed, “the burned house.”“We miss the burned house, too,” Perlman tells her. “We’re going to build another one.”

A proposed bill could reignite the long-running battle over new Oregon-Washington highway bypass

Environmentalists have vehemently fought similar proposals in the past.

Two lawmakers have revived an old proposal to potentially construct a highway bypass between Oregon and Washington as an alternative to Interstate 5, which they say would ease congestion in the Portland area.It’s an ambitious and controversial idea. The bill, introduced Thursday in the Oregon Senate, would require the state to study the effects of extending Oregon 127, which runs west of Portland, north across the Columbia River and connecting it to I-5 in Washington.The one-page bill is light on details and does not state where a potential highway extension would cross the Columbia River or where it would connect with I-5. Regardless, any proposed bypass would almost certainly cut through farmland or environmentally protected areas. For years, some state and local officials have unsuccessfully pitched similar highway extension projects in Washington County. Proponents say it would ease congestion for truckers and commuters who have to sit in daily traffic on I-5 or U.S. 26 in Portland, while also meeting the needs of a growing population.“Big transportation projects take forever, and I’d prefer that we get in front of the need rather than try to play catch up 30 years from now,” said Sen. Bruce Starr, a Republican from Dundee. Starr and Republican Sen. Suzanne Weber of Tillamook, both members of the legislative transportation committee, are the bill’s only sponsors.Environmentalists would likely oppose any highway extension project that arises from the study. They have vehemently fought similar proposals in the past, typically arguing that extending highways through farmland defies Oregon’s strict land use laws. They have argued that cities should instead invest in other environmentally-friendly solutions to reduce congestion.Any proposed extension of Oregon 127 would likely cut through areas protected by Oregon’s land use laws. The highway currently ends at U.S. 30 just south of Sauvie Island, much of which is zoned exclusively for farm use.“1000 Friends of Oregon opposes efforts to pave over our state’s precious farmlands or other natural resources without good reason,” Krystal Eldridge, spokesperson for the environmental nonprofit, said in an email. The farmland on Sauvie Island, she said, is “home to some of our region’s best soils, which are irreplaceable and essential to safeguard for the long-term benefit of our communities.”Starr said he would expect environmentalist opposition and described this bill as a “conversation-starter.” He reiterated that although the study would have to be completed by next September if the bill passes, any potential highway extension or bridge construction would require a public engagement process and would likely take years to get underway.“(Environmentalists) don’t understand that you got to move people and freight, and congestion only creates more pollution,” Starr said. “At the end of the day, you got to have level-headed folks that recognize what’s important as to making an economy work.”Oregon truckers and business groups who have typically supported highway extensions would likely throw their political weight behind any proposal designed to ease congestion.The likely battle between environmentalists and business groups over such a project reflects the delicate position that Oregon lawmakers find themselves in regarding transportation funding and policy. Lawmakers are currently crafting the state’s first major transportation package in eight years, which will require balancing the desires of cities, environmentalists, truckers and other interested groups.Cassie Wilson, transportation policy manager for 1000 Friends of Oregon, said she hopes lawmakers will continue to invest in public transit and safety improvements “over costly new projects the public has not asked for.”It’s unclear if the bill will move forward this session, which must end by late June. Rep. Susan McLain, a Democrat from Forest Grove and co-chair of the transportation committee, did not say whether she would support such a proposal. “Timing is everything,” she said in a text.— Carlos Fuentes covers state politics and government. Reach him at 503-221-5386 or cfuentes@oregonian.com.Our journalism needs your support. Subscribe today to OregonLive.com/subscribe.Latest local politics stories

Palisades and Eaton firefighters had elevated blood levels of mercury and lead, according to an early study

Early findings from an ongoing study report that a group of 20 firefighters tested after the Palisades and Eaton fires had higher-than-expected levels of mercury and lead in their blood.

The immediate risks faced by the firefighters who were on the front lines battling the Palisades and Eaton fires that tore through Los Angeles County may have abated, but long-term health concerns remain. A team of researchers tested the blood of a group of 20 firefighters who were called to duty when the wildfires hit Los Angeles County communities, and found that they had levels of lead and mercury in their blood that was significantly higher than what health experts consider to be safe — and also higher than firefighters exposed to a forest fire.The results are part of the longer-term LA Fire Health Study, which is investigating the health impacts of the January fires on those exposed to the toxins it released into the the environment. The team includes researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, UC Davis, the University of Texas at Austin, and the USC Keck School of Medicine.“What you need to worry about is some of these metals that, when they get burned, they get up in the air,” said Dr. Kari Nadeau, chair of the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and one of the researchers working on the project. “They can get into your lungs, and they can get into your skin, and they get can absorbed and get into your blood.”The group of 20 firefighters — who had come from Northern California to assist in the efforts — were tested just days after the fires were contained. They had toiled for long hours as the two fires razed entire communities, burning homes, cars, businesses, and a still unknown list of chemicals and metals. Combined, the fires killed 29 people and destroyed more than 16,000 structures. On average, said Nadeau, the firefighters had lead and mercury levels three and five times higher, respectively, than a control group of firefighters who fought a forest fire alone. According to the California Department of Public Health, the average blood lead level for adults in the United States is less than 1 microgram per deciliter.Researchers are still looking to expand the number of firefighters in the study, as well as the range of toxins they may have been exposed to. Nevertheless, even these limited and preliminary findings bolster a growing worry among firefighters that the L.A. fires may have exposed them to metals and chemicals with long-term health effects. “The results are pretty alarming,” said Dave Gillotte, a captain with the Los Angeles County Fire Department and president of the Los Angeles County Firefighters Local 1014. “We don’t just fear, but we’re quite confident that we’re going to see health impacts with our firefighters who fought these fires on the front lines.” Firefighters regularly risk exposure to chemicals and metals — including lead and mercury — when responding to house and commercial fires in an urban setting, Gillotte said. But response to a single house fire, for example, would likely last a few hours, not the days on end of the Palisades and Eaton fires. Firefighters also typically face prolonged exposure to the particulate matter in smoke when fighting wildfires in rural areas — but not the chemicals of an urban setting. The Eaton and Palisades fires presented a combined risk: a wildfire-like blaze with firefighters on the ground for extended periods in an urban setting, with electric vehicles, batteries, chemicals and metals burning in high heat, mixing and spreading with the same wind that was spreading the flames. “It was a more intense exposure as a result of the wind driving those toxins, even with our protective gear,” Gillotte said. According to Gillotte, these types of urban wildfires could cause long-term health impacts for first responders similar to those from events like the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Already, officials from the Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District, the Sacramento Fire Department, and Los Angeles County have begun to test their firefighters for metal and chemical exposure, Gillotte said. Meanwhile, as part of a separate study, Los Angeles city fire officials have also been looking at the health effects on its firefighters. “We are very concerned and worried,” said Los Angeles Fire Department Capt. Kevin Frank. The LAFD has so far taken blood and urine samples of about 350 of its firefighters, as part of an ongoing nationwide study, funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to look at firefighters’ biomarkers and exposure to cancer-causing substances. That study — which is different than the LA Fire Health Study and the one mentioned by Gillotte — includes more than 7,000 firefighters from across the country.After the fires, Frank said, several firefighters who reported to Altadena and Pacific Palisades reported health issues, such as trouble breathing. Nadeau, who is working on the LA Fire Health Study, but not the FEMA-funded national study, noted that exposure to heavy metals can contribute to worse long-term health outcomes. Firefighters already face higher levels of some illnesses, such as autoimmune diseases, asthma and some cancers, she said. Fire officials said the life expectancy of a firefighter is about 10 years lower than that of the average person. The LA Fire Health study is still in its early stages. Nadeau says she and her colleagues plan to look for evidence of exposure to other heavy metals in addition to mercury and lead. “We’re going to be studying toxins that haven’t been studied” in firefighters before, she said. Typically, the results of studies like these are not made public until they have been peer-reviewed and published by a scientific journal. Nadeau said the consortium decided to share some of the preliminary data early, hoping to help residents, civic leaders and first responders understand the impacts of the fires. “You really want to know: ‘What’s in the air, what’s in the water, what’s in the ash that blew into my kitchen cabinet? Do I let my dog outside?’” she said. “All these questions were coming up and we thought, ‘We really need to serve the community.’” Indeed, while the initial findings will be focused on firefighters’ exposure, the team is also looking into residents’ exposure to heavy metals and chemicals.Nadeau is also looking ahead: The information, she says, could help fire officials as they face the possibility of another similar fire by helping them better understand the source of the chemicals, how safety equipment was used during the fires, and the efficacy of that gear.“I’d like to say this is the last of its kind, but we know it won’t be,” she said. “It’s not a matter of if, but a matter of when people undergo a fire like that again in L.A.”

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