News from rural America.

This week on Yonder Radio, we’re starting with a conversation between Daily Yonder reporter Madeline de Figueredo and Mia Sarot about high-voltage transmission lines coming to central Texas. Find your next read or watch from a conversation between Daily Yonder culture reporters Susannah Broun, Anya Petrone Slepyan, and Madelon Basil highlighting a few of the best pop culture hits from this summer. We also talk to Alex Campbell from Amazon Prime’s Murder 101 docuseries, where Campbell’s rural Tennessee sociology classroom solves a longstanding cold case. Reporter Claire Carlson takes us on a salmon migration from the Pacific Ocean back to their birthing grounds in a Pacific Northwest river. Then, food journalist Nhatt Nichols brings us to a winery in Oregon where the winemaker is also a climatologist. Our featured musician this week is West of Roan, a folk band from western Washington. Tune in for all that, and more, on Yonder Radio.

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I'm Jared Ewe, the host of Yonder Radio.

Every week we bring listeners to rural conversations with National Beach, and we are doing it again this week.

Daily Yonder reporter Madeline DiFigueredo and Mia Sarat talk about high-voltage transmission lines coming through Central Texas.

And then we've got our pop culture team on your next read or watch from a conversation between Daily Yonder culture reporters and Amazon Prime's Murder 101 docuseries where we talk to the inspiration in this rural Tennessee high school classroom where they solve a long-standing cold case.

And reporter Claire Carlson takes us on a salmon migration from the Pacific Ocean back to their birthing grounds in the Pacific Northwest River.

And then another reason to fight climate change with the intrepid Nat Nichols graphic journalist taking us to a winery in Oregon.

And our featured musician this week is an incredible conversation with West of Verona, a folk band from western Washington.

Tune in for all of that and more on Yonder Radio.

Yonder Radio, Rural Conversations with National Reach.

Hi, my name is Jared Iwi, and this might be the perfect show.

I don't know, we strive for it every week, but I'm feeling it.

And you will too, because coming up, we bring on a woman I'm just calling the voltage whisperer as she helps translate the issue of the big transmission line proposed to go through Texas.

We have the pop culture roundup on the way.

Oh, and we bring in some superstars.

Right now, if you go to Amazon Prime, the show Murder 101, we're going to talk to the teacher who is teaching that class, and we'll also go spawning with the salmon.

But right now, before we get to the trivia and the music, we have news with Jan Patolsky, news editor for the Daily Yonder.

What is happening in this week's top rural headlines?

Hi, Jared.

This week, we're starting with Capital B and a story about Trump being ordered to release billions in climate grants for black and underserved communities.

A South Carolina federal judge ordered the EPA, or the Environmental Protection Agency, to resume distributing funds designed to address environmental and health challenges.

That comes in conjunction with another ruling that released nearly $20 billion in greenhouse gas reduction fund awards, bringing the total of federal funds for climate change-related issues to almost $22 billion.

All right, now we have a segue here from climate change to firefighters sounding the alarm from The Guardian.

What is happening here?

Yes, The Guardian brings an interesting story about how the U.S.

Forest Service has faced a critical personnel shortage this fire season, despite official narrative that firefighters are doing better than ever.

Some who chose to stay anonymous because of policy of secrecy at USFS.

They claim that the workforce has been stretched to its limit, that they're barely making ends meet, and it's only mid, if we're lucky, of the really harsh fire season.

And finally, from Axios, Washington vows to fight Trump's mail-in voting order.

This is hot off the press.

Yes, so the Supreme Court allowed, for now at least, President Trump to implement his executive order restricting mail-in ballots.

That will have huge implications to many, many states and many rural populations.

Axios, in particular, singles out Washington, where all of the voting has been done by mail since 2011.

The executive order asks that there will be lists of authorized citizens who can cast their ballots.

And the Postal Service is instructed to send ballots only to those on that list, which naturally makes a lot of different groups and people nervous about potential disenfranchisement and limitations to voting ability of people.

Well, more on that as we follow the news with Jan Patalski.

Thank you so much.

Thanks so much, Jared.

And now this news that you may have heard over the week.

Dolly Parton died at the age of 80.

She had said about her health issues, they dig more stones out of me every year than a rock quarry in Rockwood, Tennessee.

Staying true to her rural roots, despite amassing a fortune of over $650 million, being on the silver screen, having 11 Grammys, selling over 100 million albums, she could do it all, and right up to the end was encouraging people to read and learn, and she will be missed.

And I will always love you And now, Madeline DeFigureto from the Daily Yonder, she's a reporter, and she gets in conversations with people around the country with big issues, and this one with Mia Surratt, founder of the Hill Country Land and Legacy Alliance, And she's helping communities through Texas understand the new voltage transmission line proposed to go through the Lone Star State.

And here, the two talk about that.

One of the things that I noticed about you is that you're a translator of sorts for the community, taking all of this jargon-dense technical energy policies and procedures and making it understandable for an audience like me.

So with that gift in mind, can you tell me a bit about what has been happening in rural Central Texas with this line?

Back in June of 2025, thousands of landowners across Central Texas got notifications in the mail and they were just little letters that look pretty indescript.

And a lot of people thought they were junk mail and didn't pay much attention to them.

But what they let the landowners know was that there is a 765 kilovolt transmission line proposed for their area.

Encore and LCRA TSC proposed a 765 kilovolt transmission line.

And these are the largest transmission lines in the United States.

They have never been built in Texas.

The largest that we have right now is a 345 kilovolt transmission line.

And the point of this transmission line is to take power from central Texas out to the Permian Basin.

So the towers are somewhere about 140 to up to 198 feet tall, possibly taller, and 141 feet wide or even possibly wider if needed.

The easements are 100 foot each direction, so 200 foot wide at a minimum.

So this is not power for the areas that it's traversing, but it's kind of just one way to move it from one area to another.

I run Hill Country Land and Legacy Alliance.

I am not qualified.

I don't have the funding to really fight the legal battle.

So I'm not an intervener as the group is not an intervener, but my group helps arm the citizens with the information that they need to then try to fight.

Before this, you weren't a professional organizer or an energy expert.

How did you get pulled into this issue?

And what has the last year been like just from a boots on the ground perspective.

In late July, I had a neighbor stop me in my driveway.

She blocked me in and I was like, what's going on?

And she goes, have you heard about this transmission line?

And I'm not going to lie to you.

I said, what's a transmission line?

She's like, there's a huge electrical transmission line.

And I think it's coming down your street.

And she was pretty alarmed.

And I said, I've never heard of this.

And she said, they're really dangerous.

They have a lot of health issues, a lot of concerns.

Please check it out.

And I said, okay, I'm going to work.

I Yes, I will.

And when I got home, I talked to my husband who happens to be an electrician and he's like, okay, transmission lines are pretty common.

And we looked up the size and he's like, whoa, that's not common.

Hold on.

And so we start looking into it and we're just like, oh my gosh, these are massive.

There's, you know, if you get online, you can see there's a lot of concerns with them.

We're like, what is going on?

Where is this going?

And I started to go to community meetings.

So there were a few town halls and at the town halls, we didn't get a ton of information.

It was, this is bad.

We don't want it.

Here are the steps.

And there was only like one meeting every three weeks.

And so it felt like it took forever to get any information.

And so we got our route organized.

I sent mailers to everybody on my route, mailers that I thought they should have gotten in the first place.

I did community meetings just to let people know this is what's happening.

This is what you can do about it.

These are the people to talk to.

We need to engage our legislators and we have to be a collective voice.

And when we started doing that, we really, really, really started to gain some traction.

A lot of people were starting to go, okay, we can do this.

If someone is out there providing us with the information, then we can do this.

It's been a whirlwind.

It's been a big year, but seeing that people need information and don't know where to find it, especially a lot of these affected landowners are elderly people and, you know, elderly ranchers in Texas.

I mean, they don't even have email addresses.

They don't have computers, so they just use their cell phone.

Once I saw the need, I just really felt a pull to try to help them.

One thing you've said is that this isn't just about a line on a map.

The stakes of a project at this scale and the speed have both wide-ranging effects and very long-term effects across the state, not just in Burnett County, not just, you know, in immediate proximity to the line.

What concerns has this project raised for you and for the rural communities surrounding you about the future of Central Texas as a whole?

Some of my top concerns are that I feel like rural Texas doesn't have a strong voice.

We are an easy area to run through because we are not population dense.

There is an uneven effect on rural landowners than suburban or obviously urban landowners.

And that's incredibly infuriating to me that Texas builds its identity off of these people and then takes advantage of them like this.

We also become a corridor.

What happens with that is when transmission lines and pipelines and highways and anything get cited, they typically try to run through corridors that are already established.

So what happens is once a lot of these rural communities get won, then they just get hammered over and over again.

This is a huge, massive project, and I think it deserves some legislative oversight.

And I don't think that it can get that because the condensed timeline fits it within, in between legislative sessions.

I think another concern of mine is also, and this sounds counterintuitive, but the way that this is all handled is all through technology.

When you get out into some of these areas in really rural Texas and you start talking to some of these ranchers, they don't know how to navigate that very well.

And I feel like are going to lose their rights in the process.

And that is incredibly frustrating.

But one of my biggest concerns is that we are funding this entire thing.

So this entire project is going to be paid for by the rate payers of Texas.

And we're socializing that cost to benefit private companies.

So we are not moving power around in population-dense areas.

We are taking it from population-dense areas and taking it to the Permian Basin for the stated intention of providing it to gas and oil.

And then there's also data centers and all of that, which are their own huge issue.

Well, Mia, thank you so much for sharing all this information.

And one of the highlights of my spring was driving out to Burnett County.

And the hills, as I drove in, looked purple because they were just covered in blue bonnets.

It was wildflower season.

So thank you for sharing your corner of rural Texas with me and for sharing all this hard work.

Absolutely.

That was Madeline DeFigureto with The Daily Yonder talking to Mia Surratt, founder of the Hill Country Land and Legacy Alliance.

The Public Utility Commission of Texas is expected to make a final decision about the line and its route in September.

Now, our featured musician this week, West of Roan.

People, we are about to take a journey to the underworld.

This is a band from the misty forest and the oceans of western Washington.

The name West of Roan comes from both a mountain on the Tennessee-North Carolina border and a Gaelic seal people.

If this gives you any idea of the kind of unique music they perform, here's our conversation with West of Roan.

Well, I want to get to Queen of Eyes, and I want to get to why NPR was raving about you, but I was really curious about you being able to record music and make videos, and you're off-grid.

And this is just a gearhead moment between the three of us, but I want to know what your setup is to make that happen.

Yeah, so we recorded the Queen of Eyes on Waldron Island, where we had solar, so it was a pretty basic setup.

We had our computer.

We used Reaper as a platform to record on.

We have an ear trumpet condenser mic, so really close.

That's why we would sit very close together while we were playing.

And so we had solar panels.

Computers really take very little power, actually, so it would need to be not even enough to power a home.

So it's an entirely possible world to record your music and be off-grid. yes Queen of Eyes is the album that you came out with in 2024 when I hear the phrase concept album I get excited because I want to know now it's kind of weird I want to know if I'm smart enough to hang on through the whole thing and get it what is going on in Queen of Eyes because I think somebody gets eaten and it's good for them that is incredibly smart I got it yeah thank you so much And I will provide some background here because I did have some help in your liner notes because you mentioned that the Queen of Eyes came from a time of darkness or mental illness.

And you realize that you need to fully enter the underworld and give yourself over to the forces that reign there.

Can the two of you take me to this underworld and share with the world what that is?

If you want, it's not an easy place to visit.

Embracing myself, listeners, be prepared.

We are going to the underworld with West of Rome.

Oh, I just got some shivers.

In the folklore and in the mythology, there are so many stories about descent.

And I really find this especially with folk and fairy tales that have a goddess or a female-ish character as the center of it.

And we're still parsing out what that means in a lot of ways. but it certainly resonates in our lives, these periods of time where illness or the body just draws you in and down, which is a really important direction to go for understanding ourselves and knowing the parts that we're made of and finding resilience.

And sort of like, not opposite, but a counterpoint to the more outward hero's journey mythology we see a lot in a lot of superhero stories and action movies and things like that.

If you go there, you will build strength and perhaps even a community.

Yeah.

NPR reviewed Queen of Eyes and they went nuts.

What I came away with is there's not ego here.

They are here to take you on a journey.

I mean, they are conduits to these stories.

And I'm wondering, what are your favorite stories that people are missing out on?

You have done this research throughout the world of finding mythologies.

Is there something that America could use right now?

Is there some story that we just don't get to hear enough or at all?

So much.

I think any stories that are talking about the underworld, talking about death, talking about the shadow aspect of experience and like not imposing an angle on that, but just like, how can we read that?

Because I think in Western society as we know it, there's so much rejection of that entire aspect of experience that ends up meaning a lot of us gets rejected too.

So anytime we are in illness or in pain, something about that experience is being rejected by the mythos of the culture and we feel really isolated.

And then vulnerability feels hard to access and community feels hard to access.

That's part of why we work with these stories and work in the way that we work.

We're needing that for ourselves and we're seeing that other people need it too, like a space for this kind of invisible or shadow aspect of experience to be brought out a little bit and felt and just tended.

Come with me to the mountain Come with me to the mountain Come with me to the mountain To the mountain Useful concept to harmonize loneliness or isolation.

It makes me think of this description of the two of you sitting on a piano bench sharing a trumpet mic.

What is the thing that you are singing now on the piano bench?

Yeah, we are writing new songs, so we're kind of in a forming of a new album.

It'll be the first one we've made since I had a kid and since moving to separate towns a few hours away from each other.

So it's interesting to pick it up from this place.

Well, thank you so much, Channing.

Thank you so much, Annie.

They are of West of Rome.

They have an album about Queen of Eyes, and there's another in the works, and I greatly appreciate the time.

Thank you, Jared.

Far, come.

That was a conversation with Channing Sherwalter and Annie Shermer, the two musicians who make up West of Rome, and you can find their music on Spotify or wherever you listen to music, And you can follow them on Instagram, westof, and then underscore Roan, R-O-A-N, or on their website, westofroan.com.

It's time for our trivia clues of the week.

The answer to this week's trivia is the largest civil insurrection in the history of the United States after the Civil War.

So we have more clues for that coming up.

And then we're going to solve some crimes or give it our best with one of the nation's most popular documentaries on Amazon Prime, That's all on the way on the honor radio.

Yonder Radio, rural conversation with National Reach.

Coming up, a conversation with Alex Campbell.

You may know him from Amazon Prime's Murder 101.

We'll talk about that documentary.

Also, Salmon.

How do they spawn and why and how are we affecting it?

But now, Daily Yonder pop culture reporter Susanna Brown, Anya Patron Slepian, and Madeline Basil are wrapping up a summer of great media with, well, you know how George Thurgood had one shot, one bourbon. one beer.

They're doing it one book, one movie, one TV show.

That's what they're talking about.

And here they are on Yonder Radio.

So we are reaching the end of summer.

So we want to let you all know about some specific rural media that we've been consuming this summer.

So with me, I have Madeline Basil.

Hello.

And Ani Patron-Slepian.

Hey.

And I'm Susanna Brown.

And the three of us are going to shout out some notable recent rural media.

We're going to start with Anya.

You have a television series for the Yonder Radio listeners.

What have you been watching?

So I've been watching Widow's Bay, which is on Apple TV.

I adored this show.

It was so much fun.

So this is a series that was created by Katie Dippold.

It's about the mayor of a small island town, which is about 40 miles from the New England coast, and he is trying to put his town on the map as the next Bar Harbor or even Martha's Vineyard.

He wants this to be a New England tourist destination.

But there's one major problem, which is that the island is under a centuries-old curse, and things are getting pretty intense in the supernatural realm.

When I was first seeing promo for this show, I didn't realize it was gonna be funny.

It's hilarious, and it all kind of makes sense when you understand the backstory a little bit, which is that it was originally written or conceived of as a spec script for Parks and Rec, where Dippold used to be a writer.

It does a lot with horror tropes, and especially rural horror tropes that I really appreciate, but it's also hilarious.

And that's because it has some of the same ingredients as Parks and Rec, like really wacky public servants, a real commitment to bringing this small and weird community to life.

And so, yeah, there are jump scares and you know it got a little tense there in certain parts of it but most of the time I'm I was just cackling to myself because it was absolutely hilarious yes I have started watching it I haven't finished it yet but I'm really loving it you're totally right Anya I have had actual nightmares about it but also laughed really hard I have not seen anything that can balance those tones and so I think that's a huge accomplishment of Widow's Bay yeah and I'm really excited to see where it goes in the next season.

It's already been renewed for season two.

Season one is available on Apple TV and season two hopefully won't be too far away.

Okay, so Anya told us about the television show Widow's Bay and Madeline, you have a book you're going to tell us about.

What have you been reading this summer?

So I recently read the book Yesteryear, which if you get any of your reading recommendations from social media you have likely heard about.

It's a novel with a pretty provocative premise, which is that it follows this modern trad wife influencer who then mysteriously wakes up in the 1800s.

And there she's forced to actually participate in this homesteading lifestyle that she's been promoting online.

And it's the debut novel from Carol Clare Burke, who's also a co-host of the cultural commentary podcast, Diabolical Lies.

I recently started listening to that podcast and she's definitely an author who I think is very into with the current buzziest social media topics, for sure.

And for all of that buziness, there is some dark, dark stuff in yesteryear.

In a lot of ways, it feels more like a conversation starter book because it sets up this really delicious like what if scenario but at times the writing specifically the writing of that main character Natalie doesn't always feel nuanced enough to help us better relate to real life women that might be in her position it also seems like this isn't a book that's necessarily going away anytime soon oh definitely not there is more yesteryear discourse certainly to come because Anne Hathaway is now set to star in and produce an upcoming film adaptation.

She's just everywhere.

It's really her moment.

She's having a great year.

One interesting thing I want to note is that she was actually thanked in the acknowledgements of yesteryear for helping to develop the character of Natalie.

And so I'm really eager to see what she does with this character.

Yeah.

Exciting.

Susanna, you have a film recommendation for us, right?

Yes, I have a recommendation of a documentary.

It's by director Susanna Herbert.

Yes, another Susanna.

This is a documentary called Natchez, and it's about a town, Natchez, Mississippi, which is a massive antebellum tourist destination.

And the documentary is about the tensions that exist in this town surrounding how the town's history is told.

It follows owners and tour guides of antebellum plantation homes, who from their perspective view these tours as not only a major saving grace of Natchez's economy, but also, as they describe it, a sort of escape from modern life.

But on the other side, the documentary follows people giving different tours, specifically one man, Tracy, who goes by Rev, and he is telling the stories of slavery and the true reasons that these massive plantation homes exist.

And his fight for transparency of this historic time period and also asking the community to reckon with the dynamics of race and identity and memory that exist in Natchez, this town.

I think this documentary is really a fascinating deep dive into one specific town, but it also is just telling a broader story about how America views and grapples with our history.

One thing I loved about this documentary is how the editing is so interesting because it's telling one version of history right next to another telling of history.

And it's almost darkly funny.

Like, it's not a comedic documentary, but seeing these people in this town giving their own tours and explanations of this town right next to each other plays in such an interesting way.

I would say if you're a fan of documentaries or history or honestly just, like, very good storytelling, I really recommend Natchez.

You can watch it for free on PBS's website or also rent it on various streaming platforms, which includes Amazon Prime and Apple TV.

I will be adding to my Letterboxd watch list for sure.

So those are three pieces of rural media that we have been watching or reading this summer.

And you can always read more rural media analysis by subscribing to the Good, the Bad, and the Elegy newsletter at dailyyonder.com.

Thank you both.

Thanks, Susanna.

Thanks so much.

This was fun.

What rural media have you been watching, reading, or listening to?

We want to know.

Email us at info at yonderradio.com.

It's time for our second song from this episode's featured musician, West of Roan.

Here's the song, The Baron, on Yonder Radio.

Where is my low open heart?

They call in my own tongue And I don't speak this language They are the ones who carry me away They've opened up the door Come through, come through There lies the door to the forest of my heart Green grows the rose and flower Long and left alone And when I pass through I'll be walking And now the Baron That was Wes DeBron's song, The Baron.

And now Alex Campbell teaches high schoolers in East Tennessee.

And when he decided to focus the lesson on a decades-old mystery plaguing their small town, they ended up cracking the case.

A new documentary series on Amazon Prime called Murder 101 follows Alex as he leads a classroom of kids through a cold case and subsequently discovers more and more.

Here's Alex talking about how it all happened.

We'll also have Andrew Barnett on, one of his former students, talking about this show, Murder 101.

How did you come across talking about true crime in your sociology class at Elizabethton?

So I was teaching down in the CTE or vocational area of our school, even though I'm a social studies teacher.

And I was just, you know, standing out in the hallway talking to the other teachers.

Hey, what's going on?

What are you teaching about?

And one of the teachers was criminal justice.

And we just started talking about our classes, what we were doing.

And we just had this idea, hey, what if we like team talk a class?

And I handled the kind of sociology, psychology stuff.

And he handled the criminal justice stuff.

He was able to get a local case, which was from right here in our county.

And it just happened to be a teenage girl who was white.

She had reddish hair.

She was killed in the 1980s, and she was left beside of a road.

What I found is that that type of victim was actually quite common in Tennessee in the 1980s, and I had never heard of it.

I was intrigued.

I wanted to learn more.

And as I delved into the Red Murders cases, I thought, man, my kids were so engaged last semester, let's just continue it this semester and we'll look at the redhead murders.

And really the big question was that the law enforcement never really determined if there was a serial killer operating in any of these cases or not.

So I said, hey, we'll just start there.

We'll do some research and we'll just see what the students think about whether there was actually a serial killer in Tennessee in the 1980s or not.

Well, Alex Campbell, teacher at Elizabethton High School in East Tennessee, and one of your students is here, former student, Andrew Barnett.

Now, in the documentary, they mention that Mr.

Campbell's going to be teaching some weird stuff.

Was that your perception when he went into this class?

Yeah, because I'd already had him twice before the class, so I knew whatever we were getting ready to do was going to be crazy, but I had no clue at the time that it was going to turn into this.

I'm wondering, Alex, have you gotten any blowback from the community of like, hey, wait, you're talking about a lot of stuff we would rather not have aired to a national audience.

The school and the community, the parents have been very supportive.

I think they get what I'm trying to do.

If you watch the documentary, you'll see that death, you know, the law enforcement, prison, drug abuse, you know, those type of things, that's not something that's foreign to most of our students.

They struggle, their families, You know, their neighbors struggle with these things.

And look, they're brought up all the time in movies and media and songs and, you know, everything, video games, everything the kids are exposed to.

But what we get to do in my class is instead of sensationalizing those things or seeing the way the media is portrayed, we get to learn about them in reality.

And you have me to help God, but we have these professionals, you know, law enforcement, mental health counselors, all these people, victims, family members, survivors.

And it seems that our community really understands what we're trying to do with that.

I wanted to talk about this moment where you and the students are interviewing the survivor of a serial killer.

And everybody's holding it together much better in a documentary than I am watching.

What was that conversation like?

I'll start with you, Alex.

I had been looking for her for a while.

I consider her my close personal friend now and hero.

She's an amazing lady.

Although she does want to stay private and you can understand the reasons why.

She also is a very strong woman who realizes that she's lucky to be alive.

And not everybody got that.

Most people didn't as far as we know.

And there's families that are struggling and they want answers.

And she feels like she might be able to help just that little bit meeting the students.

I have new students every year.

So she got to know some of the other students in years past.

But, you know, she needed to meet these students and just see why they wanted to meet her. and why she was so important and I'll let Andrew talk about kind of what that was like to experience that.

I had been approached by Mr.

Campbell and the film crew about making a video of introducing me and the classmates to try to I guess make her feel a little bit more comfortable about speaking with us and then also to share why we felt like it was super important and I think one of the really the biggest reason for me that I think I noticed was as a kid in high school you know even when we heard about this stuff and we did some research on the victims and everything it's so crazy that this happened that sometimes it doesn't almost feel real but when you're sitting in front of the person who lived that and you get to look at her in the eyes and she tells you it you can't deny it and it also just like lit a flame and I feel like all of us to like really push and try to like every day come in and know that like the work we do matters yeah that's one of the things I've really been trying to do the last few years.

I think the reason that students are disengaged from their learning is because they don't understand how what they're learning is impacting their world or the real world.

What I try to do is let my students see who their work is going to impact.

You don't work for your grade or your GPA.

We've been entrusted with these people's stories in their lives, and that's who you're working for.

Are you stunned at where you are now with this?

wow uh yeah i think so you know i knew there was a better way i knew i could be a better teacher i mean i was a young teacher i was still learning but what i found is that every year when i let kids do things with higher and higher stakes they never let me down they just work harder and they accomplish more so it really just encourages me every year to think up things that you know problems in our community in the world that they feel are important and they want to get involved in and they want to help people.

I was just smart enough to stop doing so much as a teacher and just let the kids do more.

When you let kids have a purpose for coming to school and coming to class, a lot of things can be achieved and a lot of good can be put into the world.

Well, Alex Campbell and Andrew Barnett here from Murder 101, an incredible short documentary series on Amazon Prime right now.

Thank you for coming on Yonder Radio.

I asked my students what they wanted out work on the redhead murders and they said if this can help just one victim get their name back much less solve a murder it would be more than worth all the work that's put in so i want to thank you for being part of their dream thank you for being part of the solution that was alex campbell and andrew barnett both of whom are in the docuseries on amazon prime murder 101 it's time for our second trivia clue.

Here it is.

The fighting during this event took place from August 30th to September 4th, 1921 on a ridge in the Appalachian Mountains.

Okay, more clues, your answer, and we're going to go spawning with salmon on Yonder Radio.

Thank you. guitar solo Yonder Radio Rural Conversations with National Reach.

Hi, my name is Jared Ewe.

Now we can share this piece from reporter Claire Carlson as she reflects on salmon migration, climate change, and the act of paying closer attention to our local ecosystems.

If you live in the Pacific Northwest, you've probably heard about salmon migration, which begins in late summer and extends into December every year.

Salmon are born in freshwater rivers and streams.

Once they're old enough, they head to the ocean.

If, when, they reach about four years old, age differs between salmon species, a sort of homing sense kicks in.

They start heading back upstream, usually to their birthplace, to spawn and then die.

How does a salmon find its way, sometimes hundreds of miles, back to its exact birthplace?

Scientists don't totally know.

The U.S.

Geological Survey theorizes that salmon use the Earth's magnetic field like a compass to go back to where they were born.

Why?

Because they know it's a good place to spawn.

To get back home, salmon navigate by smell.

If they can't find their way home, some will continue to search until they run out of energy and die.

Everything about this migration is beautiful and tragic to me because of what it can tell us about our future.

Wild salmon populations have decreased drastically in recent years as the health of rivers and streams deteriorate with climate change and habitat loss. nearly half of the wetlands in Oregon's coastal estuaries where salmon live have disappeared 80% of tidal wetlands in Washington's Puget Sound have been cut off from rivers or destroyed to make room for development roughly 90% of California's wetlands have been paved over to me this warns of times to come times when salmon won't be so easily accessible I remember in sixth grade I learned what global warming meant for our planet.

Always the animal lover, the biggest takeaway for me was that animals would start to disappear if we didn't do something.

I went home after school that day and wrote handmade flyers with sketches of birds along the border to stuff in my neighbor's mailboxes.

Did they know that in 50 years there might not be birds in the sky?

That in 50 years the salmon on their dinner plate might be a thing of the past?

That was almost 20 years ago, and things are more dire now.

Author and artist Jenny Odell writes about a concept called bioregionalism in her 2019 book How to Do Nothing, Resisting the Attention Economy.

Bioregionalism is a place-based philosophy that asserts that human cultures develop in relationship with the environments they inhabit.

Odell argues that in the 21st century, the digital age, we've abandoned this relationship with our surroundings.

Bioregionalism can give us a sense of rootedness in this world where everything is competing for our attention.

Casting our attention toward our local ecosystems, the changing colors of tree leaves in the fall or the salmon on their hero's journey home, goes against what our digital world demands of us.

These demands for growth and money and development have led us down a very dangerous path.

And it's a path we might not survive unless we opt out of it.

I'm opting out by looking for the salmon.

What will you look for?

And now we're going to stick around in the Pacific Northwest to talk about another reason to curb climate change.

This is wine and a story about what climate change is doing to vineyards with reporter Nat Nichols.

What variety is it ends up up here?

So we have two different things.

These are every little area that we grow grapes are called blocks.

To the left here is Syrah.

The block to the right is Tempranillo.

Both of the varieties are pretty hardy and they do very well here.

The Tempranillo is what my dad really decided was what he wanted to grow, and so we have the most acreage of that.

That's Greg Jones.

He's the owner and winemaker for Abasala Winery.

But that's not the only reason I drove down to Roseburg, Oregon to meet him.

He's also spent the last 25 years as a climatologist, specializing in how climate affects wine.

Perhaps wine isn't your first concern when it comes to climate change, but because of the way winemaking works, its production involves a lot of climate change factors.

I spoke with Greg at his busy winery.

While outside, the heat of the day reflected off sharp, gravity-defying hills that provided plenty of surface area for vines to capture the golden light.

Inside, where we're talking, you'll hear some background noise as bottles were being opened and drinks were being poured.

There's a term that's used in wine production.

It's really kind of universal.

It's just that wine is more synonymous with it, and it's called terroir.

It's a French word.

It doesn't have a perfect direct translation or conversion in other languages, but what it means is it means the environment that a crop is grown in and produced.

And so when you look at wine, you're really talking about the climate and the weather and the soil and the landscape and the plant systems and then the people that go about doing that farming and doing that production.

All the factors that make up a wine's terroir, heat, water, soil health, and the health of the people who make it, are all things that are affected by climate change.

Since this most recent summer was one of the hottest on record on the West Coast, I want to know how climate change affects vineyards and wine production.

It's really quite complicated because what happens in this industry is that we have a tendency to do the same thing over and over again.

And what I mean by that is that there are 5,000 plus Vetus finifera wine grape varieties in the world, and yet we grow 20 of them to any degree worldwide.

Basically, if you let the consumer choose what finds you plant instead of letting the land and the climate lead the way, you're going to have a lot more issues with climate change.

There's a law called Hopkins Bioclimatic Law, And it has to do with the nature of plant systems and animal systems and how they relate to climate.

For every degree, degree and a half, you can find those systems, those ecosystems moving toward the coast, up in elevation, or north in latitude.

Because wine grapes stay in one place for a long time, it's important to select a varietal that's not at the wrong edge of the climate limit.

Because it's going to be too difficult and costly to move a whole vineyard up in latitude or in elevation.

And so that's why you wouldn't force it.

For example, you wouldn't plant Pinot Noir in the warmest place in the world, and you wouldn't plant Cabernet in the coldest place in the world.

Because Greg's dad, who founded the winery, did an excellent job of picking the right place to plant tempered neograpes.

Greg says he isn't staying up late at night worrying about climate change.

If you selected the right varietal for the right place, there isn't that much you can do beyond being a good steward of the land and focusing on maintaining the ecosystem that keeps your vines healthy.

That said, there are aspects of climate change, like smoke contamination from wildfires, that can be disastrous for wine production.

In 2020, that was a very, very big year for wildfires.

And in Oregon, I would say most everybody was touched in some way, shape, or form.

I sat down for a glass of wine with Andrew Visa, who at the time was a wine buyer for one of the top restaurants for wine in Washington State.

Andrew has an interesting story about what happened to those grapes.

Huge quantities of Southern Oregon grapes were smoke-tainted and basically couldn't be sold.

Well, the buyers refused to take them, especially the big corporate conglomerates that had signed up for tons and tons and tons of those grapes were rejected.

Now, the Willamette Valley wine growers got together and basically bought the wine to support those growers and make what they could out of it, which helped them get through that year. that was driven very much by Willamette Valley Vintners.

And it was genuinely tough, like as a wine buyer, as I was at the time, when that vintage was released, so 2022, 23, even 24, those wines had come through and they tasted fires of smoke.

You could smell it in the glass.

And wine lovers will often talk about things like terroir and the wine tasting of the place and the taste of the year.

It's like, yeah, the wine tastes of smoke and smells of smoke.

Nothing speaks to that year more than that experience.

Some of the wines were reasonable to drink, but it's tough to put them on a list of people who, you know, if you're running a restaurant, like a lot of the people who come in don't give a damn about what the farmers are going through.

Climate affects the flavor of wine in more ways than simply with smoke.

Craig explained that the high temperatures have already changed the way wine tastes.

What happens in a warmer world, you end up having the plant system accelerate its growth cycle.

And so you end up getting riper fruit in the middle of the season when it's still hot.

And when you do that, you don't get balanced.

You don't get balanced kind of chemistry and flavors and aromatics.

And so those kind of things have already happened.

If you look back in 1970s, 1980s, and fast forward to about 2020, you can see that the average alcohol levels have already gone up.

And that's directly related to sugar and rightness.

So when you have warmer temperatures, you get more sugar.

More sugar becomes more alcohol.

And what happens when you get more alcohol, you have less acid.

And acid is what makes wine really appealing with food.

I mean, we don't drink wine for the alcohol.

We drink wine for how it works in a food-based culture.

And so I think the climate component has already caused some of that, and it's going to continue to do that.

It probably will cause some cultural identity issues, too.

You know, this region has a little bit of an identity, a 60-year-old identity of growing grapes.

But think about Burgundy, a thousand years.

Maybe doing the same thing virtually in the same way.

And if things change there, then it's a problem.

I really liked what Greg said about cultural identity shifting as wine changes, because in spite of its elite reputation, wine isn't made in an urban setting.

It's a rural product with real climate consequences for the rural people who make it.

Andrew elegantly sums this idea up.

The production of it is a pretty farming slash working class activity.

There are very, very few wineries that operate in a level where everybody sort of is a lab coat type thing.

Most of them have a dog running around some punk rock on the radio and they're getting their hands dirty.

And then, of course, producing something that is poured by a white-gloved waiter in a country club to somebody spending it with stupid money.

It's one of the ironies of the industry.

It's a shame a lot of the time.

I think wine deserves to be less seen that way.

Climate change will impact wine in a way that it impacts a lot of other places.

Things where people have lived, worked, and produced for centuries may become fundamentally uninhabitable.

I'm Nat Nichols, reporting for Yonder Radio.

Thank you, Nat Nichols.

I mean, this just adds to the list of reasons to curb climate change.

One, men like me are likely to go shirtless, and they shouldn't.

And also, wine is in jeopardy.

And now, it's time for our final trivia clue.

The year was 1921.

The fighting in this event was the culmination of the West Virginia Coal Wars, a series of skirmishes between the United Mine Workers of America and strike breakers, private detectives and sheriffs.

The answer is the Battle of Blair Mountain.

Simmering tensions over the mistreatment of mine workers exploded into armed conflict when an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 coal miners took up arms on a march towards Mingo County, West Virginia, which is near the Kentucky border.

Governor Ephraim Morgan had declared martial law in Mingo County in an attempt to crush unionization efforts.

But to get to Mingo County, miners had to cross Blair Mountain in Logan County.

There, they faced off against a private army led by Logan County Sheriff Don Chafin, which, this is insane, used airplanes to drop gas and shrapnel bombs left over from World War I on the miners.

The conflict ended when President Warren Harding sent federal troops to intervene.

The Battle of Blair Mountain is the largest labor uprising in American history.

And just some of what we offer here as we want to share conversations and trivia and information that you can just kick back and listen to delivered fresh to you every week.

Thank you so much for joining us on radio stations across the country.

And you can learn more at yonderradio.com.

Thank you for listening to Yonder Radio, a production of the Center for Rural Strategies, publisher of The Daily Yonder.

I'm your host, Jared Ewing.

Thanks to Don Castle and the Tennessee Sheiks, Steph Gunno and the Lone Tones, Quincy Ponfair, Leo Pozel, and Tim Merrimah for the great music.

Our editor and producer is Susanna Brown.

This episode was also produced by Alana Newman with additional support from Anya Patron-Slepian and Julia Tilton.

Our executive producer is Joel Cohen.

The executive in charge of production is Adam Georgie.

Yonder Radio, rural conversations with National Reach.