On a late July weekend, Tara Benally, a Diné and Hopi community organizer, escaped the extreme heat sweeping the Southwest to gather with Indigenous community members at Bears Ears. “It’s like somebody turned on the air conditioner full blast,” an elderly couple told Benally when they arrived. Benally and her family live on the Navajo Nation just south of Bluff, Utah, where temperatures exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit throughout most of July. Without nearby cooling centers, higher elevations and waterways provide much-needed respite.
Back home, Benally’s parents spent the weekend extending their shade house, or chaha’oh, a structure made of cedar posts, cottonwood saplings or wood from the local lumberyard in which Diné families traditionally gather and stay cool. After working in the intense heat, though, Benally’s mom ended up in the hospital with heat exhaustion. “This heat is torture,” Benally told High Country News a couple weeks later.
Benally, a field organizer with the Rural Utah Project, previously worked as a supervisor of home construction teams with the Utah Navajo Trust Fund, a state agency now known as the Utah-Navajo Royalties Holding Fund, which administers oil and gas royalties for projects in Utah Navajo communities. That work familiarized her with the resource and infrastructure gaps — including lack of running water, electricity and stable housing — that leave her community particularly vulnerable to extreme heat. She is trying to come up with enough funding and people to construct more shade houses for elderly people in her area. “I think it’s going to be the right step to take for next summer because we really don’t know what’s going on with global warming, and we need to be prepared for it.”
July 2023 was the hottest month recorded on Earth, fueled by climate change. The Southwest is known for its heat, but the duration of extreme temperatures last month was unusual. Temperatures in Phoenix exceeded 110 degrees for 31 days straight. The Arizona Burn Center has been full; just a brief exposure to scorching asphalt can cause a third-degree burn. A farmworker in Yuma, Arizona, died from heat stroke on July 20. And there have been at least seven heat-related deaths in national and state parks this summer.
“While independence is a strength many of our residents have, sometimes it will result in waiting too long to request assistance if it is needed.”
On July 27, President Joe Biden gave an address on climate change and the heat wave affecting the nation. He announced new measures — including a Heat Hazard Alert program for workers and $1 billion in grants for tree planting — to help states deal with extreme heat. In the 25-minute address, however, he never specifically mentioned rural communities, which are often overlooked even though they often lack the resources to deal with heat. They also face unique challenges, including distance and a lack of infrastructure, and the hot summer has strained those already stretched systems.
“We are isolated, and many of our communities do not have easy access to medical care,” Bradon Bradford, health officer with the Southeast Utah Health Department, said. “While independence is a strength many of our residents have, sometimes it will result in waiting too long to request assistance if it is needed.”
But Bradford also noted that rural communities have developed strategies to keep one another safe. “Our communities are close-knit so we’re always looking out for our neighbors and ready and willing to lend assistance when needed. We’re also used to dealing with difficult situations without many resources, so we’re resilient.”
Benally, for example, regularly checks in on community members. One of her neighbors lives in a 1970s modular home without electricity. Benally, who hates to think of him sitting “in that little tin can of his in sweltering heat,” said she plans to install a solar panel on his home to power a fan to help cool him down.
In agricultural areas such as Yuma County, Arizona, community ties are often leveraged to help protect farmworkers from the heat. The nonprofit Campesinos Sin Fronteras, for example, employs promotores, health workers who are trusted community members, to connect farmworkers to health services and heat safety education.
Much of the rural West’s economy is powered by tourism, and seasonal workers in places like Moab, Utah, also have trouble escaping the heat. “A lot of folks come here to work seasonally, and if they’re not able to find a place to stay, it means they’re either living in their cars or they’re living outdoors,” Bradia Holmes, the education coordinator for Moab Valley Multicultural Center, said. “And certainly, when it hits 110 degrees at 3 p.m. that’s not a good place to be.” The center provides support for unsheltered people, ranging from a shower pass at the Moab Aquatic Center to emergency shelter in local hotel rooms. Owing to the high prices common in tourist towns, though, such emergency shelter is often limited to just three days.
The center also helps low-income community members apply for state funds to cover their energy and water bills and provides financial aid and advocacy when the utility threatens to shut off power.
Meanwhile, Epicenter, a nonprofit in Green River, Utah, is investing in long-term infrastructure fixes. This fall, it will break ground on 10 affordable housing units called Canal Commons. The neighborhood will be next to a park that was recently restored with drought-tolerant plants and picnic areas shaded by tall cottonwood trees. Epicenter plans to prioritize cooling and energy efficiency in its construction materials and design, including proper insulation, smart window placement, metal roofs that reflect the sun, and materials such as concrete fiber cement board that withstand the heat well. “We don’t use wood or vinyl, because vinyl will literally melt and wood just dry-rots here,” said Maria Sykes, Epicenter’s co-founder and director. “We’re not doing anything super high tech or outside of the realm of possibilities. We’re just trying to get it efficient and durable.”
Still, any long-term fixes will have to take climate change into account, and coordinated planning at the government level depends on local politics. For example, Emery County, where Sykes lives, is one of three counties in the nation where less than half of the adult population believes in human-caused climate change. Sykes doubts the county will make a proactive plan.
The Southeast Utah Health Department hasn’t factored climate change into its long-term plans yet. “But that will be part of our next community assessment and integrated in our community health improvement plan,” Bradford said.
In New Mexico, a 2019 executive order requires state agencies to “integrate climate change mitigation and adaptation practices into their programs and operations,” which has encouraged policies that increase community resilience and incorporate climate change into public health planning.
Benally hopes that resources from Biden’s heat initiatives and the Inflation Reduction Act will make a difference on the ground in her community. But she worries that all the different levels of bureaucracy make that an “uphill battle.” In the meantime, she said, she’ll keep trying to get help to her neighbors the best she can.
Brooke Larsen is the Virginia Spencer Davis Fellow for HCN, covering rural communities, agriculture and conservation. She reports from Salt Lake City, Utah. Email her at brooke.larsen@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy. Follow her on Instagram @jbrookelarsen or Twitter @JBrookeLarsen.
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