Air Date: February 28, 2025

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Trump Tries to Limit Environmental Reviews


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Major fossil fuel projects like LNG terminals could become harder to oppose on environmental grounds because of a Trump executive order that tries to weaken agency compliance with NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act. Dan Farber is Faculty Director of the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at UC Berkeley and joins Host Jenni Doering to explain the role of NEPA and how environmental concerns may take a backseat under the new project review process. (11:14)

Bringing Sea Otters Back


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Sea otters were hunted out from Oregon and Northern California more than a century ago amid the fur trade, but the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians and conservation partners are now working to bring them back. Robert Kentta, treasurer of the Siletz tribe, talks with Host Paloma Beltran about how reintroducing sea otters can help revive the kelp ecosystem and restore a vital cultural connection for Native people. (09:23)

Mother and Son: Sea Otter Bonding / Mark Seth Lender


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Mother sea otters spend a lot of time grooming their young pups. It’s a bonding experience as well as a matter of survival. Clean and well-groomed fur keeps these sea otters afloat on the coastal waters where they spend their entire lives. Living on Earth’s Explorer-in-Residence Mark Seth Lender narrates a precious scene of an attentive otter mom and her young pup. (02:23)

David Brancaccio on Fire Recovery / David Brancaccio


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The thousands of homes that burned in Los Angeles this January included the home of Marketplace Morning Report Host David Brancaccio. David joined Living on Earth Host Steve Curwood to share what he’s learning about the challenges of rebuilding with a limited supply and huge demand for contractors. (24:24)

Show Credits and Funders

Show Transcript

250228 TRANSCRIPT

HOSTS: Paloma Beltran, Jenni Doering

GUESTS: David Brancaccio, Dan Farber, Robert Kentta

REPORTERS: Mark Seth Lender

[THEME]

BELTRAN: From PRX –this is Living on Earth.

[THEME]

BELTRAN: I’m Paloma Beltran.

DOERING: And I’m Jenni Doering. President Trump is trying to weaken the “magna carta” of environmental law.

FARBER: What he said was, except as required by law, the regulations should give absolute priority to efficiency and clarity. And absolute priority I think means, and no consideration of environmental issues, except to the extent that they just can’t avoid it.

BELTRAN: Also, Native American tribes are bringing back sea otters to Oregon’s coast.

KENTTA: They represent the abundance that sea otters create in that near shore ecosystem, and our traditional stories really relate to that including stories of a girl marrying a sea otter, and the sea otter then leaving presents on the beach for her family.

BELTRAN: That and more, this week on Living on Earth. Stick around!

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[NEWSBREAK MUSIC: Boards Of Canada “Zoetrope” from “In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country” (Warp Records 2000)]

Trump Tries to Limit Environmental Reviews

DOERING: From PRX and the Jennifer and Ted Stanley Studios at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, this is Living on Earth. I’m Jenni Doering.

BELTRAN: And I’m Paloma Beltran. The US is already the world’s largest exporter of LNG, or liquified natural gas. And dozens more export terminals are proposed or in the works especially along the Gulf Coast. President Biden had paused new LNG terminal and pipeline permits until the end of 2024, but the Trump administration issued an executive order that lifts that pause and could make it harder for opponents to object on environmental grounds. And all of these natural gas projects could have a huge climate toll. If completed, the Sierra Club estimates that their greenhouse gas emissions would be the same as more than 800 coal-fired power plants.

DOERING: Yeah, that’s just enormous, and it could really make it hard to slow the climate crisis. But Paloma, there is a law that places some guardrails on federal projects like LNG export terminals. It’s called NEPA, or the National Environmental Policy Act, and it was signed into law back in 1970. It’s sometimes called the “magna carta” of environmental law, but it’s now a target of a Trump executive order. Since it was passed the law has required federal agencies to consider the potential environmental impacts of their actions before plowing ahead. And they must make these Environmental Impact Statements available to the public for comment and review.

BELTRAN: That’s right, Jenni. And if they’re not up to snuff, the courts can order agencies to amend or redo their analysis. For example, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission or FERC prepared an EIS for the Rio Grande liquefied natural gas and Rio Bravo pipeline projects on the Texas coast back in 2019. But you know, court review stalled those projects for at least another 5 years over environmental justice concerns.

DOERING: And now this process of environmental review for major projects appears to be yet another casualty of President Trump’s executive order blitz. You know, until now, the review criteria have been standardized by the White House, but President Trump wants to let agencies like FERC write their own rules for complying with the law. And this might speed up the permitting for major fossil fuel projects, including LNG. Dan Farber is a law professor and Faculty Director for the Center for Law, Energy, and Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. He’s on the line now to walk us through what’s going on. Welcome to Living on Earth, Professor!

FARBER: Great to be here.

DOERING: Can you give us an example of a high-profile project in maybe recent years where NEPA played a significant role in making sure that that project was done in a reasonable way?

FARBER: Some of what NEPA does is invisible, right? Because agencies, even before they start to propose a project, will be thinking about, how can they minimize the environmental impacts and try to avoid having to do a big environmental impact statement? But I think, for example, all the cases that you see about natural gas pipelines, about oil drilling, all of those cases, they've at least had to take environmental issues into account, and tried to find ways, for example, to minimize the impact on habitat or minimize the impact on wildlife. So it really is kind of pervasive. It rarely kills the project outright, but it often results in kind of rejiggering a project to try to make it less environmentally harmful.

DOERING: Now we're talking to you Dan, because in one of his many day-one executive orders, President Trump took a stab at NEPA. What does this executive order say in regards to this environmental law?

FARBER: That was kind of a sleeper. It's part of a very long executive order about energy, and a lot of people didn't even notice it at the time. A little bit of background is necessary to understand what Trump was doing. Apart from creating environmental impact statements, NEPA also created an agency called the Council on Environmental Quality, which sits in the White House. And since the time of Jimmy Carter, the council, often called CEQ, has issued regulations telling agencies how they have to go about writing environmental impact statements and really filling in the very general language that's found in the statute. Those regulations were really well-accepted, and courts paid them a lot of attention as really representing the, I don't know, driver's manual for the Environmental Impact Statements for NEPA. Courts have really looked to those regulations to define what agencies can do legally and what they can't do legally. What Trump did, two things. One is he immediately revoked Jimmy Carter's executive order, to take away that binding effect, and as a result of that, agencies are no longer required to follow the CEQ regulations as they were in the past. And the other thing he did was assign the agencies to write their own regulations dealing with Environmental Impact Statements.

DOERING: I guess I'm a little confused about one aspect of this. The Council on Environmental Quality is within the White House. You know, that seems like a little bit closer to the President and perhaps more control over what CEQ is doing. Why would the President want to sort of transfer that regulation power to the agencies?

FARBER: I think that's really a puzzle to tell the truth. Now they haven't transferred quite as much control as it looks like, because the White House is going to be coordinating these agency rule making, and coordination probably means pretty strict orders about what to do and what not to do in this setting. But still, it seems like it would be much more efficient to just have CEQ issue binding regulations, as it has in the past. And I'm really perplexed. One possibility is they're doing it because they've decided on sort of ideological grounds that they don't like CEQ. Conservatives have kind of rebelled against CEQ regulations in the past. I think it's kind of counterproductive because of the confusion it will cause. They're maybe getting rid of part of the existing structure, and they like to deconstruct the administrative state, but in the course of doing that, it creates uncertainty that makes it harder for agencies to know what to do, and it also makes it harder for courts to know what the rules are in dealing with Environmental Impact Statements, which means that the permitting process for oil pipelines and coal mines and offshore drilling are all going to get more fraught, and I don't really see how this advances their agenda.

DOERING: So while the Trump administration isn't taking away NEPA entirely, because they can't, that would require an act of Congress, they are seeking, it appears, to weaken the influence of NEPA in federal agencies. What's at stake here for the environment and for communities across the country?

FARBER: I think the stakes are pretty significant. Many government decisions about public lands in particular and public waters like the coast and offshore operations are not governed by very strict environmental standards. And the thing that really keeps environmental considerations on the table is the need to comply with NEPA, and therefore the need to be able to say something plausible about exactly what you're doing to the environment and why it won't be that bad, and you don't really have any alternative. That's sort of your typical impact statement. But without NEPA, there wouldn't even be that. It would be much easier for them to run roughshod over environmental interests in the way that clearly, some people in the Trump camp would like to do. One other thing Trump did in the executive order that we haven't talked about, is he gave some marching orders to the agencies about writing their new regulations. And what he said was, except as required by law, the regulations should give absolute priority to efficiency and clarity. And absolute priority, I think, means and no consideration of environmental issues, except to the extent that they just can't avoid it. And I think getting rid of NEPA, or at least limiting it as much as possible without violating the law, is a step in that direction. It also fits in, I think, with the use of the energy emergency as an excuse to further speed up and streamline environmental reviews, again, with the aim of making it as light a touch as possible, so you can brush past any environmental issues and get what you want done.

DOERING: Dan, to what extent has there been a call to reform NEPA from across the political spectrum?

FARBER: I should say that the idea of streamlining permitting is not entirely a conservative or Republican idea at this point. It was historically, but there's also concern that some of the permitting and maybe some of the environmental reviews are slowing down renewable energy projects and electric transmission projects, which we need to use the renewables. So there's some support for the idea that we ought to do streamlining. I think the difference between the left and the right on this issue is that the people on the left want to retain a greater role for environmental considerations, and the people on the right would be happy to wash their hands of them entirely.

DOERING: Now, one of the key objectives of NEPA, as I understand it, was to give the public a chance to weigh in on projects that could significantly impact their communities. To what extent will public participation and commenting still be a part of the NEPA process?

FARBER: I think that's something we'll really need to see. I don't think they're going to get rid of it entirely, and there's some basis in the statute for thinking that would be difficult, but on the other hand, there's no real advantage to them to have a lot of public participation that's just going to gum up the works. So I wouldn't be surprised if the new regulations included some efforts to really curtail the amount of participation by the public. Along with these changes in the NEPA regulations, Trump has also abolished agency environmental justice offices, and has said that agencies should not consider environmental justice because it's a form of DEI. And so that also is going to really curtail the ability of communities to make a difference in the proceedings.

DOERING: Right, so they might be raising environmental justice concerns that almost fall on deaf ears.

FARBER: Yes, I think that quite likely will be true.

DOERING: Dan Farber is a Law Professor and Faculty Director for the Center for Law, Energy, and Environment at UC Berkeley. Thank you so much, Professor.

FARBER: Thank you for having me.

Related links:
- The White House |“Unleashing American Energy Executive Order”
- Environmental Protection Agency | “What is NEPA?”
- US LNG Export Tracker (click on Toplines tab to see emissions estimates)

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[MUSIC: Barbara Higbie, “Land of Gold” on Presence, by Barbara Higbie, Slow Baby Records]

BELTRAN: Just ahead, tribes on the West Coast are working to bring back sea otters.
Keep listening to Living on Earth.

ANNOUNCER: Support for Living on Earth comes from Sailors for the Sea and Oceana. Helping boaters race clean, sail green and protect the seas they love. More information @sailorsforthesea.org.

[CUTAWAY MUSIC: Eric Tingstad, “Shakin’ in the Cradle” on Mississippi, by Eric Tingstad, Cheshire Records]

Bringing Sea Otters Back

DOERING: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Jenni Doering.

BELTRAN: And I’m Paloma Beltran.

[SOUNDS OF OTTER PUPS]

BELTRAN: Those tiny squeaks of sea otter pups may soon return to the coasts of Oregon and Northern California, thanks to the efforts of the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians.
Sea otters were hunted out more than a century ago for their thick fur, leading to devastating consequences for the kelp forests that relied on them. To help revive the kelp ecosystem and restore a vital cultural connection with sea otters, the Siletz tribe and conservation partners at the Elakha Alliance are working to reintroduce otters to the area. And to help with that goal they’ve received a one and a half million-dollar grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Joining me now is Robert Kentta, treasurer of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and member of the Elakha Alliance. Robert, welcome to Living on Earth!

KENTTA: Thanks for having me.

BELTRAN: From what I understand, sea otters are considered a keystone species, meaning that they are vital in maintaining their ecosystem. What role do otters play in keeping their habitat healthy?

KENTTA: Sea otters are sometimes even referred to as an ultra keystone species, because they don't just maintain a habitat or become an important component of that ecosystem. They actually create and maintain that kelp forest habitat, which leads to diversity and abundance in that near shore ecosystem, because kelp forest is a nursery for juvenile fish species, both ocean fish and anadromous fish like salmon and sea otters, one of their main foods is urchin, which grazes on kelp, and that's why they're so important to that ecosystem, because without a voracious predator of sea urchin, you have sea urchin population overrun, and they will completely graze out at kelp forest to where it's at urchin barren. And then those Urchins don't die, they just become like a zombie state, kind of a hibernation, until they detect that there's food available again, when the kelp, if it has survived that severe grazing, comes back, then they wake up and start grazing on it again, leading to the same problem.

BELTRAN: Why have sea otters disappeared from Oregon and Northern California's coast?

KENTTA: They were very quickly hunted to total absence in most of their original range. There were just remnant populations in Southern California. I think there were only about 50 animals in that southern California population when they were first discovered and then protected and allowed to expand and thrive. The Alaska population has always been more robust, but they were really a small remnant population compared to their historic numbers as well. And then from basically the Aleutians to Central or Southern California coast, they were just totally absent until those reintroductions happened in the late 60s and 70s.

BELTRAN: So the Siletz Tribe just received this $1.56 million grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to help bring sea otters back to Oregon and Northern California's coast. How will these funds help the tribe reintroduce otters?

KENTTA: There are several objectives to the grant, and one of them is to build tribal capacity for several coastal tribes, both here in Oregon and Northern California, so that our biology staff are up to speed on the issues around sea otter presence and reintroduction. And hopefully we can, that way, be much more proactive and active in the planning for the reintroduction and eventually for the reintroduction themselves. Part of the grant also, I believe there's about $100,000 a year that goes to the Elakha Alliance from the grant. It's a three-year grant, and it's to assist with that coordination and public outreach for meetings that will be held, lots of public education around the essential nature of that near shore kelp forest habitat. And then there will be a contractor identified and hired to work with US Fish and Wildlife in the development of the actual reintroduction plan.

BELTRAN: So in addition to their importance in the kelp forest, how can reintroducing sea otters to Oregon help other otter populations to the north and south?

KENTTA: Yeah, currently we have those widely separated populations, and US Fish and Wildlife basically treats them as sub populations or sub species when they used to have contiguous contact with each other and there was genetic exchange. An artifact of them almost being completely hunted to extinction, is the fact that we have those northern and southern very small remnant populations with a very shrunk genetic pool, or gene pool, and so the longer that those two populations are left in the current state of no genetic exchange, we have the, especially with the southern sea otter, a real risk of genetic bottlenecking to where they start having dangerous or harmful mutations that are then passed on through the generations and eventually have total population collapse. The remedy to that is reconnecting those two populations, genetically.

BELTRAN: Fascinating. And you know Robert, beyond their ecological role, I understand that sea otters are culturally significant to the Siletz Tribe. Can you tell me more about what they represent?

KENTTA: Yeah, sea otters are the densest fur on a mammal in the world, and so a very warm, very comfortable, very fuzzy undercoat, and it was very prized as a clothing item. Our people really prized those pelts. And therefore it was really only chiefly people with wealth and status that were allowed to wear sea otter pelts, and so to us, they represent prosperity. They represent the abundance that sea otters create in that near shore ecosystem. And our traditional stories really relate to that, including stories of a girl marrying a sea otter and the sea otter then leaving presents on the beach for her family.

BELTRAN: You know, this effort to bring back sea otters to Oregon's coast was a collaboration between non profits and conservation researchers, all with the guidance of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. Why are indigenous partnerships and leadership so important in conservation and restoration planning?

KENTTA: I think part of the answer to that is we have 1000s of years of experience with our local ecosystems. We understand not just from stories of our elders, but our own lifetime experience how things have changed. A lot of federal agencies, state agencies and researchers and others are looking to the body of information that has been gleaned from our tribal communities by anthropologists. Anthropologists would come and ask our ancestors questions about resource abundance and use, and so those notes are in university and national anthropological archives, and people could gain access to that. But our position is that unless you talk with us about those notes, there's lots of information that's missing from those notes, and you are not going to get the complete picture and maybe even be misled if you don't understand what the elder was saying, because a lot of them didn't speak English, or speak English very well, and the linguist is trying to understand and then write down in English a lot of times what he thought he was hearing. And so we have to run that information through our filters and add supplementary information to help others understand what our elders were talking about.

BELTRAN: You know, some may argue that things are looking bleak in the world of conservation. What message do you hope listeners take away from the Tribe's work?

KENTTA: Well, I think the collaboration that we have in re-establishing the Elakha Alliance and working with Rogue Native Plant Partnership, all sorts of partners, federal, state and NGOs, nongovernmental organizations. To me, we're not in a hopeless situation, but we're in a very concerning situation with a lot of our landscapes and resources and sustainability of life as we know it today. Those kinds of partnerships are essential to moving forward, getting enhancement and restoration and resilience built in our ecosystems. Every little nudge we get, like this three-year grant, pushes us towards that finish line and adds to our level of hope. So we're quite excited to get the work going and move it on to that next step of getting the reintroduction plan established, having all of our coastal communities engaged in that conversation, and move on to the actual reintroduction and start seeing those benefits again.

BELTRAN: Robert Kentta is a member and treasurer of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, and is part of the Elakha Alliance. Thank you so much for joining us.

KENTTA: Absolutely, thank you for having me.

Related links:
- Read more about the Elakha Alliance and their work to return otters to Oregon
- Read more about the Confederated Tribe of Siletz Indians
- The Oregonian | “The Push Is On to Return Sea Otters to Oregon, Northern California Coasts”
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service | “Sea Otters Are Unlikely Helpers in Our Fight Against Climate Change”

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[MUSIC: Orchestre Makassy, “Mambo Bado” on The Best of World Music-Africa, by T. Asosssa/Makassy, The Best of World Music-African, Putumayo]

Mother and Son: Sea Otter Bonding

DOERING: Just a little farther down the coast, there is a surviving population of sea otters in Monterey Bay, California. And that’s where Living on Earth’s Explorer in Residence, Mark Seth Lender, watched a mother and pup among the kelp.

Mother and Son
Southern Sea Otter
Elkhorn Slough, Monterey Bay
© 2021 Mark Seth Lender
All Rights Reserved

LENDER: In the narrowed channel, a mat of kelp or weed or salt grass floats along, without a notion of its own, captured by the absent-minded tug and turn of eddies at slack tide between the sand bars. It drifts, closer. Then shifts, further. Catching in a spiral of water turning, turning until…

Recognition!

Mother and Son Sea Otter!

The baby is newborn, one week, maybe two. Round and wet, unable to fend for himself. Cannot care for himself. His mother washing, scrubbing, rubbing, combing every inch of him. And when she finishes one end, working from the long spiky fur of his tail, she turns him on the Lazy Susan of her belly and starts all over the opposite way, from his sweet wet face on down. He opens his eyes. He has a sleepy look. She props him up on a cushion of water and dives, and comes back with a clam she breaks open and divides but does not share with him.

He is too young. But soon…

Then sea clam will be food to him, the taste he will follow all his life. When he is older and stronger and heavy enough he will learn to follow her down and down to the cloudy bottom, and recognize the shapes and smells and take a stone and crack the shell. There will be a lot to learn. He is lucky. She will as mother otters do take the time to teach him.

As much, and as long, as he needs.

DOERING: That’s Living on Earth’s Explorer in Residence, Mark Seth Lender.

Related links:
- Read Mark's Field Note for this essay
- Learn more about author and photographer Mark Seth Lender’s work
- Special thanks this week to Kayak Connection of Moss Landing, CA

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[MUSIC: Gary Burton, “Clarity” on Next Generation, by Julian Lage, Concord Records]

David Brancaccio on Fire Recovery

BELTRAN: The Los Angeles fires this January ravaged entire neighborhoods, reducing thousands of homes to ashes. And one of those homes belonged to David Brancaccio.
David has worked in public radio and television for decades, but you likely know him as the Host and Senior Editor of Marketplace Morning Report. David and his wife Mary, the poet and former teacher and journalist, had bought their Altadena, California house just two months before it went up in flames. David Brancaccio shared what he’s learning from his brush with the climate crisis with Living on Earth Host Steve Curwood.

CURWOOD: So there you are in this house you just acquired, just started to move into, and the fire happens. What was it like to walk through the rubble of your neighborhood and your home the first time when you saw it after this fire? What did it feel like?

BRANCACCIO: Over the years, I've covered all sorts of disasters, but with my work in journalism, you go in, you try to do good work by lifting up people's stories. You hope it makes lives better, and then you leave. This is the story that I can't leave. I've seen so much in my career, I had covered an earthquake in Turkey in which 30,000 people died, but I was not prepared for the violence of the fire. There's so little left. When you go back to just my linear street, one house is okay, according to the fire department, eight houses can be repaired. Steve, twenty one houses just on that block are completely destroyed. They just have, like, the chimney sticking up there. The outline of the house was mainly what you would see at the bottom of a campfire the day after: light, fluffy ash, little nuggets, marshmallow-sized char, and almost nothing else. I guess one of the things that you did see that illustrated the violence of this conflagration was the house came with two front loading, a washer and a dryer. They were kicked back on their backs, nearly unrecognizable, facing up to the sky. I'm like, what exactly happened here? And I did find something. I was doing a piece about climate change for PBS television some years ago, and we climbed to the mouth of the Ganges River in the Himalaya. And if you take some of the water from where it shoots out of the glacier, it's said to be sacred, and pilgrims do this. So of course, I had to do this, and I collected it in this little copper flask, a little vessel. And we've had it in the house in the east for years. We brought it out when we moved in in California, and Mary Brancaccio used it to sprinkle on the interior of the house as a kind of blessing. And on a third check, I found its remains, charred, but in the right shape, missing a little piece, certainly, the water had evaporated, but it was nice to collect that little object. It meant a lot to us. By the way, Steve, here's what Mary asked for in this blessing in November. She asked for those living within these walls to be protected. That worked. At the time of the fire itself, we were back east packing the rest of the stuff, so physically, we're fine. Didn't have to go through the trauma of the raining embers, being evacuated in the middle of the night. So it was some days afterwards when we went out to the site and I, I asked Mary if I could record for radio that moment.

MARY BRANCACCIO: I look around, and now all I see is all the hard work it's going to take to bring it back, and I'm wondering if I still have it in me to do it, if I'm still young enough to do it.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: And we're in our mid 60s, and we both have a lot of energy, and she's collected more energy since that bad moment, but it's a whole, full time job now.

CURWOOD: So talk to me about the extent that you've seen your neighbors coming together in the wake of this disaster. What's the atmosphere been like in your community?

BRANCACCIO: It's very interesting. Lots of signs up saying, "Altadena is not for sale." And it's an organizing principle to get people together, and that is code for something important, which is, if you can't figure out how you're going to rent because your house was destroyed, you are going to be open to predatory developers who come by right after the fire and offer you less than what your property will be worth, just so you can have some cash flow and survive. And there's a community wide discussion about making resources available so that people can resist that. And I don't know about you, do you have one of those, like WhatsApp list serves for your neighborhood, where neighbors say, trash pickup is actually going to be moved by a day because of the storm? I don’t know if you have one of those.

CURWOOD: Yes, yes.

BRANCACCIO: The version of this that we have up in Altadena has been exchanging crucial information, loads of stuff that even I with the access to information that I get as a reporter, have not seen. And it's, you know, at a time when technology can be so corrosive in its effect, sometimes this stuff actually is getting people timely information that they can act on. So I have to say that I know an order of magnitude more people, members of the Altadena community, two and a half months into our tenure than I would have had there not been a disaster. I mean, if I'd had it to do over again, I certainly wouldn't choose disaster, but it's been one of the weird corollaries of this, is the human connections that this can bring about.

CURWOOD: What are the challenges that families in the neighborhood of Altadena are facing, and what do they need to do to move forward? And maybe you could start with, what do you do with your kids in school?

BRANCACCIO: Yeah, it's hard, and some kids have merged into other schools. So there are these big class sizes placed into auditoriums in some areas. It's a hard time for people with kids in school. That's one of the big challenges. The set of challenges that we're facing on our end have a lot to do with supply chains and logistics. When just in my fire, 9000 structures are burned, where are we going to find a contractor? I heard from a seasoned contractor a dirty secret about that line of work. Many contractors are really good at building you a new den or a deck or a kitchen, but don't have experience building from the ground up. So that's then a much smaller subset of available contractors. Well, import some contractors, you know? Well, are they aware of the nuances of the building codes in your area? One of the first things I did after finding that our house was destroyed was reach out to someone who had lost their house in a wildfire in 2008 out in Santa Barbara. And I called this guy, Jeff, and he told some hair-raising stories of friends of his who contracted with out of state builders who turned out to be charlatans. And I said, did not get their houses built? He said, not only that, one of those contractors is in jail, right? So you have to be very, very careful. Next problem: with the possibility of higher tariffs, a lot of the wall board for rebuilding comes in from Mexico. A lot of the soft lumber comes from Canada. Now, as we're talking, those higher tariffs have been delayed by a few weeks, and a further issue is the labor. Where is the labor coming in this environment? On any project that I would be party to, we would not have undocumented workers working for us, but with more people not coming in or being ushered out because of a hardened border, there will be upward pressure on the labor market. It will get more expensive to hire those who remain. It's a very complicated time to be rebuilding.

[MUSIC: Seidler and Reinmar Jacqueline Schwab, “The Invitation” on Traditional Scottish Music, by Peter Barnes, Personal copy of unpublished material]

BELTRAN: That’s Marketplace Morning Report Host David Brancaccio, speaking with Living on Earth Host Steve Curwood. And we’ll be back in a moment with more of their conversation, including the importance of rebuilding the community. Stay tuned to Living on Earth.

ANNOUNCER: Support for Living on Earth comes from Friends of Smeagull the Seagull and Smeagull’s Guide to Wildlife. It’s all about the wildlife right next door to you! That’s Smeagull, S - M - E - A - G - U - L - L, SmeagullGuide.org.

[CUTAWAY MUSIC: Simone Dinnerstein, “Goldberg Variarions, BWV 988 Canone al’Unisono” on Simone Dinnerstein-piano by Johann Sebastian Bach, Telarc Records]

BELTRAN: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Paloma Beltran.

DOERING: And I’m Jenni Doering. We’re back now with more from Host Steve Curwood’s interview with David Brancaccio, the Marketplace Morning Report Host who lost his home in the Los Angeles wildfires this January.

CURWOOD: David as I understand it, a number of insurance companies have withdrawn from or reduced their exposure to offering coverage in California. In fact, most policies are written by a system that the state helps to administer with private companies. How is the difficulty of getting insurance influencing residents' decisions to either move on or rebuild?

BRANCACCIO: I was corresponding with someone else in Altadena who says they can't expect me to rebuild if I don't know if I can get insurance in the future. It's not clear if we can get insurance, and I can't invest so much of my resources, I mean, I, like everybody else, the biggest asset we have is the house, if it's going to be uninsured. I think there's going to be a public policy response to this. Some people have talked about Medicare for all, but for insurance. California has a bit of that already with their California FAIR Plan, the insurance policy of last resort that actually I had already, but there may be that the private insurance market on its own would refuse to underwrite in this area. And if you don't believe Dave Brancaccio, how about believing Jerome Powell, the Chair of the Federal Reserve, arguably the most important economic policymaker in the country. During testimony on Capitol Hill, he was asked about this, and he said, if there isn't changes to the way we do insurance in America, there will be sections of America where you can no longer build houses because they will be uninsurable in the face of changes in climate. It's going to be a major public policy issue, certainly not just in California, places where there are tornadoes, places where there's gonna be floods or other storms. My heart goes out to a next category of people. Let's say you inherited the house, or you paid off your mortgage. You're lucky enough to have lived in the house long enough you paid it off, you owned it outright. You might not have had insurance if you didn't have to have insurance, and then you're completely out of luck, with an interesting exception, with the fire in question on our side of town. We do not know what caused that fire. I'm saying that clearly. The cause has not been determined, but there is emerging evidence that possibly the electric power companies' high tension power lines over the mountains behind Altadena, may have created a spark that started this. And if that turns out to be true, and we shall see, we don't know, that means that people who don't have insurance would be able to sue. And the way it works in California is one of the utilities went out of business after a wildfire, so there's essentially a kind of slush fund to keep the utilities in business, should wildfire lead to lawsuits. So that will take years, and the outcomes are uncertain. Lawyers will tell you it's not that uncertain, given the way of the universe and the chaos that we've seen around us recently, who knows.

CURWOOD: Don't hold your breath.

BRANCACCIO: Yeah, don't hold your breath. But it could make someone whole, but you know, in Star Date 2173.4, as Captain Kirk would say. We'll see. But if you were under-insured or not insured, it's extremely hard, because what's the first thing you got to do? You got to live somewhere.

CURWOOD: And don't you have to keep paying your mortgage even though the building is gone?

BRANCACCIO: Yeah, you do. I didn't know that, Mr. Big Shot Business Reporter here. I felt that the way the world works is that, of course, I would have to keep paying. Yes, you do. The other thing I've learned, had no idea about is that if your insurance company does send you a check and you have a mortgage and you have a loan, it's written out to Steve Curwood, and your mortgage lender. Both have to sign. So actually, the check really goes to the mortgage lender, and then the bank gives you your money in little drips and drabs as you rebuild. You don't have full control over the money. Part B, they hardly have to pay you any interest on it. And think about it, like if you had a fancy house or just a middle class house, what if that check is $800,000? What if they hold it for a year or two? It's like lots of money you could be earning on it.

CURWOOD: David, you've covered climate disruption for a long time. How did your awareness of climate and the danger of fires in California impact your decision to move to Altadena and buy a house there?

BRANCACCIO: Exactly. Having not just fallen off the turnip truck when it comes to these issues of wildfires and climate change, it was front of mind. I looked at every fire map I could find, and we ruled out large swaths of California because of fire risk. By the way, why even moved to California? Two of our three children are out there. And I'm very happy to report that my son and his partner just had a baby boy the other day. So we want to be closer with family, we think, I think is a reasonable motivation for wanting to move, but not into a fire zone. So if, my insurance policy rates my house on a scale of one to ten for fire risk, ten being don't even think about it, we're only a four. Wasn't up in the canyon. It wasn't surrounded by California chaparral. In fact, its gardens were drought tolerant, and they had the buffer that people talk about that are important when thinking about wildfire risk. Yet this was this event that was unprecedented in so many ways. When the winds started gusting 60, 70, 80, perhaps 100 miles an hour, these Santa Ana winds, they move that fire in a way that we haven't seen into a not rural, suburban area with regular houses on a suburban street. It's a reminder that we all may be vulnerable at some level to some kind of climate disruption.

CURWOOD: So you moved to this place in California, in greater LA, understanding that there's a risk from climate disruption, but the sort of impossible happens. How do you feel about rebuilding, though, especially since climate disruption isn't static, but it's getting slowly worse and worse, the so-called whiplash phenomenon, for example, that is increasing the heavy rains and the droughts because of the thermodynamics of the way the atmosphere works. So how are you feeling about the question of rebuilding there versus, you know what? This didn't really work out so well. Maybe there's a better place.

BRANCACCIO: Well, I mean, I'm not going to, the guy who covers money and finance for public radio is not going to declare personal bankruptcy. I don't have a huge choice. But this is something that I think everybody is wrestling with, given the heartache and the costs and difficulty of rebuilding, and lightning can strike twice, but I think the most serious way to answer your question is this, I need to balance the risk of rebuilding in an area that's been shown to be vulnerable with doing what I can to see that the community that was lost in this fire has a chance of being rebuilt. Now, whether or not David Brancaccio lives there or not is not going to make or break the community, but if a lot of people leave, you're going to have I don't know what left in this town, and it's a town that deserves to be taken seriously. It is a town that, on my side of town, didn't have the red lining that was prominent in adjacent communities, that kept out people of color, so that a lot of people from diverse backgrounds have built generational wealth there over years. It's also a kind of funky community, it was. Some people described it as bohemian. And there's rebuilding houses, but there's also rebuilding community. So what's happening there is we're starting to see the seeds of a really interesting conversation in which people are coming together and asking the question, what kind of community do we want to be? What were the parts of what we lost that we want to preserve? What community institutions do we want to support? And that is something that I've been lecturing on for many decades. It's called social capital. It's this resource that is worth real money. But come back around to really what you asked is like, why are you rebuilding out in California? I just don't know exactly where I'm supposed to go to hide from climate change. My wife's family has a house on a barrier island in North Carolina. Gee, that doesn't seem like such a great long-term bet at some level. Maine, my hometown of Waterville, had two outrageous floods last year. You know, it's everywhere.

CURWOOD: So David, how might we think differently about climate risks and sustainability in your neighborhood when it rises from the ashes, so to speak? What do you envision? What do you hope for there?

BRANCACCIO: I think that Altadena, California could become a model community that people could look to, look what they did there, look how they saw the existential threat of another fire in the future and responded with new ways of living. And that same conversation in which people have decided we're not just going to rebuild, we're going to talk about what we want to rebuild together, we can do some hardening of infrastructure to try to mitigate the possibilities that this would happen again. So what are the rules about the buffers between the mountains and the first houses? If it's determined that the high-tension power lines caused this, shouldn't they be buried underground? It's expensive. It's not something the utility would like to do. They would only do it under pressure. So maybe the community comes together to demand that those things are underground and that whatever happens in the future, that doesn't happen again. By the way, in our case, the house may look at some level, have the same vibe, is our current thinking. I mean, I'm not going to, Mary and I are not going to build what looks like a defensive position on the shores of Normandy. We want it to evoke the cottagey thing that we had before, but we're not going to build with the same techniques. We're going to have to spend extra to for instance, whatever the outside is, it's made out of concrete. There's stuff that looks just like siding or regular stucco that's concrete, more resistant to fire. House was 99 years old, single pane windows. Very vulnerable to if there was fire next door. Double gives you more time. A big thing is vents suck in burning embers and are a real hazard. So we have to rethink all that space to either have fancy vents that don't suck in embers or not have vents. So 100-year-old house versus one built in 2026 and 2027 has access to lots of new technology that we didn't have before. I mean, you know, heat pumps, hot water heaters that are also heat pumps, certainly solar cells on the roof. There's just a lot more we can do. Now, that slows things down a little bit, when you take a moment to breathe and to think about, wait, don't just take the footprint of your house that burned and just redo the whole thing the same way. And there is a understandable need for people to get back some of the security they've lost. So those two things are in tension.

CURWOOD: What do you think is the overall economic impact of these mega fires in the Los Angeles Basin? What has happened to the economy of California, or at least that part of California?

BRANCACCIO: It's this great perverse feature of disasters. One of the things I've covered a lot over the years is that economic growth, gross domestic product, rewards bad things as much as it rewards good things. I made a documentary film some years ago in which a little piece of it was, if I bicycled over to a farmer's market to buy an apple, it wouldn't do much for GDP, gross domestic product, but if I were to put gas in my fuel sucking car and crash on the way over to buy an apple at the supermarket that had imported it from New Zealand, the apple, I would be doing wonderful things for GDP, because there's a lot of economic activity in that. Disasters cause temporary blips upward in economic growth, because you have to, the economic activity of rebuilding. That's the problem with our traditional measures, right, Steve? They don't measure the anguish that a disaster like this causes. There should be a debit column for some of this. I did just talk to an expert at Middlebury College, an economist who did a study, and disasters depress job creation for three whole years after a disaster. But the asterisk is this, if the disaster is designated a federal disaster, with all the subsidies that come in, it doesn't depress job creation. So the federal aid that can go into an area after the really big disasters, the federal money offsets the effect, which is one of the reasons that we have those systems like FEMA, and one of the reasons we're watching so carefully talk coming out of Washington now of modifying, altering or eliminating FEMA.

CURWOOD: What you've been through, David, it's really rough, although you point out that other people have had it even rougher in this massive series of wildfires there in the Los Angeles area. And yet, when these sorts of things happen, hope can emerge. How has it emerged for you in this case?

BRANCACCIO: Well, it was, I gotta say, funny. When I called a fellow who had lost his house in a wildfire in California in 2008, first thing he said was, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. And I was not that far down the curve three days after the loss of my house to fully appreciate what he was trying to say. In his case, he felt a lot lighter when he lost all his worldly possessions. And the problem in my case is we were already casting off stuff. We were recycling as much as possible before we ever knew a fire was going to happen ahead of the rest of our move. And so I didn't need that lesson, but I got to say that you play the hand that you're dealt. And I find myself living in a completely different part of Los Angeles now, in a rental, signed up for a year, could stretch to a couple years as we rebuild, and unexpectedly, I'm near West Adams, which is an interesting neighborhood, near USC, I am near Koreatown, a fascinating neighborhood that's almost like being near Brooklyn, New York. And there's a rich diversity there that is opening our eyes to another way of living. And already, if I just counted it up, the number of human interactions, making friends, meeting people we wouldn't have is off the charts greater than had I just moved into the house, as I did in November, kept my head low and maybe met the neighbor next door.

CURWOOD: In other words, it's people, not stuff.

BRANCACCIO: It is definitely people.

DOERING: That’s Marketplace Morning Report Host David Brancaccio, speaking with Living on Earth Host Steve Curwood.

Related links:
- Marketplace | “Marketplace’s David Brancaccio on Community, Loss and Rebuilding in Altadena”
- Reuters | “Exposed Utility Wires May Have Contributed to LA’s Eaton Fire, Law Firm Says”

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BELTRAN: Living on Earth is produced by the World Media Foundation. Our crew includes Naomi Arenberg, Kayla Bradley, Daniela Faria, Mehek Gagneja, Swayam Gagneja, Mark Kausch, Mark Seth Lender, Don Lyman, Ashanti McLean, Nana Mohammed, Aynsley O’Neill, Sophia Pandelidis, Jake Rego, Andrew Skerritt, Melba Torres, and El Wilson.

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