Journalist shares perspectives from Josephine County residents living with hazardous wildfire smoke

More than 2,500,000 acres have burned so far during Oregon’s record-breaking wildfire season. Earlier this summer, smoke from the wildfires led to air quality advisories across most of the state, including in Southern Oregon.

John D. Sutter, an independent climate journalist and assistant professor of environmental media at the University of Oregon, traveled to the region in July for a reporting assignment for The Guardian. He headed to Josephine County, which was tied with Trinity County in California for the highest number of deaths linked to wildfire smoke during a 15-year period ending in 2020, according to a study published last year in the journal Nature.

Sutter spent a week hearing from dozens of residents in places like Cave Junction and Grants Pass, from frontline healthcare workers to medically vulnerable seniors and business owners. Sutter joins us to share some of those perspectives and the toll worsening wildfire smoke is taking on the tight-knit communities he visited and wrote about in his recently published story.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to wildfire smoke. Last year, a study published in the journal Nature found that Josephine County in Southwestern Oregon was tied with California’s Trinity County for the highest number of wildfire smoke-related deaths.

John Sutter, an independent climate journalist and an assistant professor of environmental media at the University of Oregon, spent a week in Josephine County earlier this summer. He talked to dozens of residents about what this means to them and to their lives. He wrote about his trip in a recent piece in The Guardian, and he joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.

John D. Sutter: Thank you for having me.

Miller: I want to start with the big picture here. It was striking to me that you chose to focus not on a single dramatic fire, but on a long term, much more pervasive issue. Why did you want to focus on almost a six month, potentially, constant?

Sutter: I’ve been writing about the climate crisis for a long time now, almost 20 years actually. I think the scariest part of it is how pervasive and persistent it is. We turn towards it in the news when there’s a major event, when there’s a fire like the one in Spokane, when there’s a flood like the one in Nepal. But there’s also this sort of invisible crisis that’s playing out all around us, all the time, in this sort of insidious slow-moving way. I find that to be actually some of the scariest part of the climate story.

So I wanted to go to a place where it’s America’s wildfire smoke capital, essentially, Josephine County, where this is such a problem year after year after year. It’s something that almost becomes, I don’t want to say it becomes normal because people don’t treat it that way, but it is just such a persistent threat that it’s something that people have to find some way to live with.

Miller: Why is the problem so bad in Grants Pass and Josephine County?

Sutter: Part of it’s the geography. There are two deep valleys in this county, one formed by the Rogue River, one by the Illinois. It’s a gorgeous place, densely forested. I think that the geography is a lot of it. I talked to people who work in urgent care, nurse practitioners and people who work in the medical field. They say that the valley just gets socked in with smoke and then they see this dramatic rise in the patients who come to them seeking emergency care because they can’t breathe, especially people with asthma or severe allergies.

So I think geography is a lot of it. I think that there is maybe some hint of a political dimension to it because I think some of the precautions around wildfires and smoke, including wearing masks out in public, are seen as something that people in Josephine County don’t always want to do because they fear judgment for that. But I think the main problem is that it’s a place where there are these deep valleys where smoke really can stick.

Miller: I want to hear more about that political piece in just a second. But I mentioned briefly in my intro, the study in Nature. What can you tell us about that? What did they find?

Sutter: They found that this county has the highest risk of mortality from wildfire smoke in the country. It’s where wildfire smoke is the deadliest, is the way that I think of it. It’s an estimation, right? It’s very difficult actually to pinpoint this as a death that the smoke caused. It’s more often the case that these are invisible fatalities where wildfire smoke exacerbates existing conditions and makes someone die prematurely, which was some of the cases that I wrote about for The Guardian.

Essentially, this study found that this county has the highest death rate in the country from wildfire smoke. It’s 17 deaths per 100,000 people. If you translate that into the year 2020 in particular, which was a deadly year in Josephine County, that’s an estimated 50 deaths just from wildfire smoke. This study, specifically, was looking at climate change’s role in all of this. So you can think of all of these cases as instances where climate change sort of supercharged the events and stacked the deck, so to speak, to make these tragedies more likely.

Miller: What were the big questions that animated your trip? What were you most interested to learn before you even got there?

Sutter: I’m fairly new to Oregon and to this region. I moved from the East Coast a couple of years ago, and I grew up in the Great Plains. So I wanted to know how you live with this? What is it like to live with this day in and day out? Which may be a silly question for a lot of listeners who also are living with this. But I found people doing fairly extreme things and passing them off as normal. I met a woman who owns a local restaurant who wets towels and stuffs them around the bottom of her door during the summer, to keep the smoke out. Lots of people keep air purifiers with them and move with them room to room, unplugging them and moving them about.

I met, like I said, nurse practitioners and people who work in the health care industry. One described for me a scene in a hospital, where there was smoke that was coming indoors despite great efforts to keep it out. The hospital actually stationed someone at the entry exit door to try to shut the door faster so that more smoke wouldn’t get in.

Miller: If I remember that correctly, she said that they had some kind of air filtration system in this hospital, but it just wasn’t enough. It couldn’t keep up with the smoke. So they had to just make sure that people come in and then, “close the door as quickly as possible because our system cannot handle the smoke.”

Sutter: Yeah, I didn’t take that story as a failure of the hospital. I took it as just sort of how intense the situation has become and how persistent the threat is.

Miller: Can you tell us about a woman you met named Joy Shinerock?

Sutter: I met Joy in a gallery that she owns. She owns this woodworking gallery called It’s A Burl which is near Cave Junction, almost by the California border. She’s often sitting, while the gallery’s open, in sort of the back room, surrounded by plants. She’s got an air purifier at her feet almost all the time, and there’s a watercolor painting of her late husband Harvey immediately behind her. I just really sort of fell in love with Joy and her family. They have a remarkable story.

I stopped there driving back to my hotel for the night and saw this gallery along the side of the road. It looks like something out of like the Shire in “Lord of the Rings” or something. It’s all driftwood walls and wizards carved into posts. There’s a sign out front that says, “Welcome to the magical kingdom of the now.” It’s just sort of this storybook place. I wandered in and started talking to Sara, who’s Joy’s daughter, just about the place. She’s telling me about the specific kind of wood that they deal with.

The name of the gallery is, It’s A Burl. I didn’t know this beforehand, but burl is the type of wood that you see kind of knotted along the trunk of a tree. It’s a growth that often comes from some sort of stress or disease. It looks like a throwaway, like you wouldn’t want that, but when you carve into it, it’s got these sort of swirling galaxies of patterns beneath the surface. It’s just gorgeous stuff. So I’m walking around the gallery talking to Sara about this. She asked me what brought me to town. I told her I was a professor at the University of Oregon. I’m researching wildfire smoke and premature deaths associated with that. And she’s like, “that’s wild, that’s what happened to my father.”

So Joy’s late husband Harvey, in 2013, which was a particularly heavy smoke year, had some pre-existing illnesses and developed a rattling cough that got worse and worse throughout the summer. He ended up passing away. Joy and Sara both attribute his death, at least in part, to the wildfire smoke that settled into the valley that year and that settles into their lives so often in the summer.

I just really felt for this family, in part because they care so much about this place. They love what from the outside might seem like an unlovable and dangerous community. But it’s a community that has come to their rescue many times when they had family emergencies, that has protected them. So they, like this woodworking that they do, which is a sort of falling in love with this unlovable wood … I just feel like there was something so charming and human about learning to live with this more dangerous world that we’ve created for ourselves by continuing to burn fossil fuels at such alarming rates.

Miller: Can you tell us about another person that you met, a woman named Chris Granville?

Sutter: Chris is a woman in her 70s who I met at a volunteer event in Cave Junction at the park in town there. She has some pre-existing conditions, including pretty severe asthma, that makes her very susceptible to wildfire smoke. She actually carries a note with her in her purse – and I thought this was very striking and wrote about it in the piece – that sort of warns people that she might have trouble with the smoke, that she might even pass out from difficulties with it, but that she has medicine on her that can help and that they should get her the medicine and make sure that she takes it.

She suggested in the note, “Don’t take me to the hospital. Don’t call an ambulance. I can take care of this on my own. I know that this is a problem.” To me, this was heartbreaking, both because it’s so common that she’s dealing with this life and death risk, and also because she didn’t want to be a burden to anyone. She’s like, “I can take care of this. Here’s the way to fix it. I go through this a lot.”

The other thing that she told me that I found just so moving was I asked her sort of what the most difficult part of wildfire smoke season is for her. She said that she’s a volunteer and she picks up other older people in her neighborhood, drives them to appointments. When I was there, she was driving someone to the bank in Grants Pass. When she’s stuck inside because the smoke is so thick, she worries about them. She’s worried that she can’t do that work of getting them where they need to go, and they might be lonely. They might need help.

So there’s really a selflessness among a lot of the people I met in Josephine County, like a willingness to help. We’re sort of out here on our own mentality a little bit, but people really go totally above and beyond to try to figure out how to care for each other in these pretty extreme circumstances.

Miller: These are two people who, among others it seems like, were willing and maybe eager to talk with you about wildfire smoke. Was that a universal? I mean, were most people that you ran into or just would go up to, were they interested in talking about smoke?

Sutter: Yeah, I think everyone there has a story to tell about how they deal with “smoke season” is what they call it. Everyone has a way of describing it. People describe the taste of the air. All these stories we’ve been talking about, it was just me wandering around the county and being curious and talking to people. Like I said, I sort of stumbled into Joy’s story and the story of her late husband. Chris was similar. I wandered into a beauty salon in Grants Pass at one point and found a situation where there were two workers and three air purifiers going. Everyone working in there or in there to get their haircut had their own very intense, in some cases life and death stories about how they cope with this.

Miller: I wanna go back to what you mentioned earlier, almost in passing. What did you hear about the political side of wearing masks to prevent breathing in these smoke particles? What have people experienced?

Sutter: Josephine County votes more conservative than Oregon as a whole, and I did meet a woman who said that she still does it, but she fears going outside in a mask because of the looks that she gets or sometimes a kind of a sly comment.

Miller: So it was kind of a COVID holdover?

Sutter: Kind of a COVID holdover. Like I think masks became politicized during COVID. They’re just a tool for people to protect themselves. But they become a symbol of something else. Unfortunately, there are people who either second guess wearing them or second guess going out. [What] I found is some people with really severe preexisting conditions just won’t go outside, because to go out in public in a mask might draw attention that they don’t otherwise want.

Miller: John, thanks very much.

Sutter: Yeah, thank you for having me.

Miller: John Sutter is an assistant professor of environmental media at the University of Oregon and an independent climate journalist.

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