This story is the first feature in a new Vox special project, Changing With Our Climate, a limited series exploring Indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history — and the future.
Alaska
Alaska snow crab fishery saw steep decline. This reporter went ‘Into the ice’ to see it for himself. – Alaska Public Media
Bering Sea crabbers and communities within the area are combating a steep decline in snow crab this 12 months, possible the results of local weather change.
That prompted the crab fleet to push farther north than typical and compelled locations like St. Paul to contemplate main price range shortfalls, as a result of the Pribilof Island metropolis relies on taxes from fish and crab processing.
The snow crab crash and its impacts are the topic of a current reporting collaboration between the Seattle Occasions, the Anchorage Day by day Information and the Pulitzer Heart’s Related Coastlines reporting initiative.
As a part of the “Into the ice” collection, Seattle Occasions reporter Hal Bernton and ADN photographer Loren Holmes spent two weeks in January aboard a crab boat known as the Pinnacle, one of many greatest within the fleet at 137 toes.
Bernton says he felt secure on the Pinnacle, however the potential for issues from ice — each on the water and the boat — was at all times at the back of his thoughts.
Hear:
[Sign up for Alaska Public Media’s daily newsletter to get our top stories delivered to your inbox.]
The next transcript has been calmly edited for size and readability.
Hal Bernton: Very early on, we began to see small bits of ice, after which type of rivers of ice. And as we moved away from this ice, although, the winds had been blowing fairly robust, and we began to build up fairly a little bit of freezing spray. And that was considerably regarding to me, since I’ve written so much about what can occur with freezing spray undermining vessels’ stability. And I do keep in mind one dialog with Skipper Mark Casto, the place I used to be type of watching the ice accumulate on the bow, and Mark checked out me and stated, “Nicely, Hal, are you nervous? As a result of I’m not nervous. And till I’m nervous you shouldn’t be.” And actually, he took issues slowly and cautiously by means of a lot of the journey. So whereas we accrued ice, we at all times took the time to get it off the boat, and I started to really feel extra snug with the circumstances that we had been going through.
Casey Grove: I simply should ask, as any individual who has handled this myself previously, do you get seasick?
HB: Yeah, I do. And that was a severe concern. I used to be going to deliver together with me, I did deliver together with me, scopolamine patches, they usually labored remarkably effectively. I can truthfully say, a lot to my shock, that I didn’t get seasick on this journey. I simply stored ready for these waves of nausea to return over me, and it simply by no means did. I used to be very pleased about that.
CG: Nicely, on the coronary heart of this reporting that you simply did had been snow crab numbers. So what’s occurring with these snow crab numbers? And the way steep of a decline have they seen?
HB: Nicely, it’s actually fairly gorgeous for a number of the biologists who do the surveys as a result of, in fact, in 2020, due to COVID, they had been unable to do the summer time surveys of crab inhabitants. In order that they did them in 2019. And once they got here again in the summertime of 2021, they discovered these staggering drops in abundance of various populations of the snow crab. The juvenile females had been down by greater than 99%. The juvenile males had been additionally approach down. And so they’re additionally much less of the mature males and the mature females. So this actually triggered a significant reassessment of what could be a secure degree of harvest for this 2022 season. And so they ended up nonetheless having a harvest, however lowering it by practically 90%. And the place folks discovered the crab, the place they may discover the crab, additionally modified fairly a bit from a few years previous, as a result of it was that across the Pribilof Islands within the southern areas of the Bering Sea, the crab had been fairly ample. However the surveys indicated, and likewise the crabbers expertise from final 12 months, that a lot of the remaining robust pockets of mature males that they had been seeking to harvest had been a lot farther to the north. So looking for the crab within the north meant encountering some fairly powerful circumstances.
CG: Why are they being discovered farther north, and what do researchers suppose occurred that led to that crash?
HB: Nicely, the ice — as onerous because it was for the crabbers to cope with — actually was an encouraging signal. As a result of the ice helps type — because it freezes and melts — this chilly pool on the backside of the Bering Sea. And the snow crab, they actually do very effectively on this chilly pool, and it acts as type of a refuge for them, as a result of Pacific cod and different predators don’t just like the chilly pool as a lot. And when the chilly pool shrank, scientists suppose that mainly that opened up the snow crab, they turned much more susceptible to predators like Pacific cod. And that was one of many causes of their dramatic decline. However they’re nonetheless undecided all of the explanation why the populations have dropped so sharply. However clearly the ice. And the ice this winter has been an encouraging signal that maybe there’ll be a much bigger chilly pool in the summertime and extra safety for the snow crab, they usually can begin — at the least over the quick time period — to rebound. However, over the long term, as I reported, forecasts are that winter ice will turn out to be far more scarce, and that the temperatures will climb within the Bering Sea, and it’ll possible turn out to be so much much less hospitable to the snow crab.
CG: I wish to ask you about St. Paul and people different Pribilof Island communities. As a result of I can think about for the crabbers, if there’s much less crab to catch, they could make much less cash, relying on what the worth is. But when that decline in inhabitants continues, what are the sensible implications for people that simply reside within the area?
HB: On St. Paul, there’s a Trident Seafoods crab plant that takes greater than 160 folks in the course of the crab season to reap crab. However for probably the most half, they convey employees in from different components of the nation or additionally they recruit in another nations. So by way of precise jobs, the plant isn’t vastly necessary to the individuals who reside on St. Paul. But it surely generates lots of income for taxes. Town of St. Paul relies upon considerably on the taxes that stream from processing the crab. So with this massive downturn within the crab processing, they face some actually vital price range shortfalls as they appear to make their budgets for subsequent 12 months. And actually, that is an island that has had lots of investments to attempt to broaden the financial system and shift from the previous days, previous to the Nineteen Eighties, when there was a business fur seal harvest, to an financial system based mostly on the seafood business. Just like the halibut fleet, there’s a neighborhood halibut fleet that is essential for folks on the island and affords so much alternatives for summer time fishing. I discovered that regardless of all of the efforts to broaden the financial system and a few vital success tales, the inhabitants had declined from over 700 within the early Nineties, to what I used to be instructed from a number of the metropolis officers, a inhabitants of about 360 at present. So it’s dropped, you realize, so much and that stunned me considerably.
CG: It seems like there’s the potential for a major income loss there within the metropolis price range. How is town bracing for that? And does it looks like the group is making ready for cutbacks?
HB: What I discovered was that the massive concern is that there’ll be an acceleration of the inhabitants decline that’s already taken place. You understand, some folks have moved to Wasilla, or Southcentral Alaska has been a well-liked vacation spot for individuals who have left the island. And so they’re frightened that if the crab useful resource stays in decline, that that can simply type of speed up an exodus from the island. And individuals who reside on the island, in fact, they’ve labored actually onerous to develop the alternatives — the financial alternatives. We haven’t talked a lot in regards to the Central Bering Sea Fishermen’s Affiliation, which is a CDQ (Neighborhood Improvement Quota) group mainly vested with shares of the seafood assets within the Bering Sea. They’re based mostly in St. Paul, they usually function vessels and assist really subsidize gasoline prices for residents. And that group has carried out so much to attempt to preserve financial alternatives in St. Paul.
CG: Yeah, that’s attention-grabbing. And there are completely different person teams which have completely different concepts about these points. However you reported that some tribal leaders are pushing for extra involvement in how these fisheries out within the Pribilofs are managed. Have you ever heard any specifics on how they’d higher handle the useful resource?
HB: The tribal authorities on St. Paul mainly developed an utility submitted to the Commerce Division for the designation of a nationwide marine sanctuary that may embody a 100-mile perimeter of waters across the Pribilofs. And they don’t seem to be making an attempt to, they are saying, handle the fishery assets. What they need is extra enter into the North Pacific Fishery Administration Council about how that space may be managed. And so they described the method to me the place they’d get along with the fishing business and different, what they known as, stakeholders and say, “Hey, what may we do otherwise to maybe give extra safety to the fur seals, which had been in a long-term decline, chicken populations, different marine mammals, and the way higher may this space be protected?” They might additionally prefer to have extra enter into how various kinds of analysis is performed across the islands. And so they have a brand new facility there that they wish to see extra concerned within the analysis. So that is all very a lot a piece in progress. Not lots of particulars by way of specifics about what these sorts of proposals could be. However first, the Commerce Division has to undergo this pretty prolonged evaluation course of and resolve over, I might think about, a course of years about whether or not this could certainly get a designation as a nationwide marine sanctuary.
CG: Is there anything you wish to add, Hal, that I didn’t ask you about?
HB: I did wish to say that we thought that the journey would possibly take eight to 10 days, and it ended up we had been at sea for nearly two weeks, as a result of it was a really sluggish harvest. Typically we needed to decelerate to keep away from taking over an excessive amount of freezing spray, or we needed to cease and shovel ice. After which the crabbing itself was initially type of spotty. Mark Casto would examine maps, he would discuss along with his brother and he would seek the advice of his previous information of the place he’d crabbed previously and located lots of crab. And also you’d discover this 12 months that there have been pockets of actually fairly good crabbing, however that they rapidly type of petered out. And if you happen to strung too many pots in a sure line, possibly that had labored in years previous, however this 12 months, solely a portion of these pots had been actually catching vital portions of crabs. So the entire thing proceeded very slowly. And we had been very grateful that the crew put up with us journalists, type of underfoot, for so long as they did.
CG: I can solely think about. That simply jogged my memory of there was a chunk in your in your story about how the “Deadliest Catch” actuality TV present of us didn’t wish to movie on the Pinnacle, as a result of issues had been too clean and there wasn’t sufficient drama or one thing like that?
HB: Yeah, it was attention-grabbing to us to see how massive of an affect “Deadliest Catch” had in Dutch Harbor. This 12 months, they’re that includes 9 boats from the fleet all going out fishing, and due to the diminished harvest, the final time I checked, there was lower than 40 boats that had been really registered to reap. And so nearly 1 / 4 of the fleet was going to be showing on “Deadliest Catch.” And, you realize, you can inform these boats due to course they’d cameras mounted on the boats and possibly a producer. One boat, when it jogged across the harbor, had a helicopter flying overhead. And mainly, Mark Casto, the skipper of our boat, he instructed us that at one level there had been discussions, a few years in the past, about presumably together with the Pinnacle as a part of that fleet. However they mainly had taken a have a look at the boat, and it has lots of safety from waves, the crew is type of a no -drama crew, they usually determined it actually wasn’t a very good match for them. So I assumed that was type of attention-grabbing, due to course the present actually thrives on drama and battle.
Learn the complete ‘Into the ice’ collection right here.
Since the late 1700s, the Juneau Ice Field, interconnected glaciers that stretch across 1,500 square miles of Alaska and British Columbia, has lost about a quarter of its volume. But it’s an “incredibly worrying” phenomenon that took place between 2010 and 2020 that has scientists especially concerned: The remote swath, which features the famous Mendenhall Glacier, dropped 1.4 cubic miles of ice annually during that decade-long period, double the rate of ice melt before 2010, reports the New York Times. In their study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, researchers add that rates of “area shrinkage” were five times faster from 2015 to 2019 than they were from 1979 to 1990.
The team led by Newcastle University glaciologist Bethan Davies pulled together decades of glacial measurements using aerial views, surveys, maps, and satellite imagery, supplementing that with in-the-field verification and research into tree rings and peat to try to figure out previous environments in the ice field. What they found was that every single one of the area’s 1,050 glaciers receded between 1770 and 2019, with 108 glaciers vanishing altogether; dozens of new lakes formed as a result. Scientists say the melt is affected by tourism; soot from wildfires that lands on the ice and expedites melting; and the wide, flat surface of thinning ice that further exposes it to warming air, among other factors.
Just because Alaska is a far-flung spot for most of the planet’s inhabitants, the glacial melt there matters “tremendously,” per the Times, which notes that “in no other region of the planet are melting glaciers predicted to contribute more to global sea-level rise this century.” Plus, scientists fear that ice fields elsewhere, including in Greenland, Norway, and other Arctic-adjacent locations, could meet the same fate, per Reuters. Global warming will likely continue to further exacerbate the situation, with one climatologist warning of a possible “death spiral” for the glaciers, per the AP. “If we reduce carbon, then we have more hope of retaining these wonderful ice masses,” Davies tells the Times. “The more carbon we put in, the more we risk irreversible, complete removal of them.” (More glacial melt stories.)
When Priscilla Frankson thinks about home, she thinks about ice — thick sea ice stretching out toward the horizon.
Frankson, an Iñupiaq masters student in Tribal Leadership and Governance at Arizona State University, is from Point Hope (Tikiġaq), Alaska, a small city about 125 miles above the Arctic Circle and one of the northernmost communities in the United States.
“For us, the ice is a part of land, even though every single year it changes and it’s always different,” she said. “I think of the way that my boots kind of crackle over the ice, or the different sounds that it makes when there’s a very thin kind of sheet of snow on the top, and how it’s a little bit softer.”
In Point Hope, where summer temperatures rarely break 60 degrees, ice and cold are a part of life. Thick, reliable sea ice is essential for harvesting whales, a key part of the subsistence diets, a lifestyle built around harvesting wild foods for personal and community use, of Point Hope’s Iñupiaq residents.
Growing up, even when temperatures reached 40 below zero, Frankson would bundle up to go play outside in the snow or go hunting on the ice, while whales passed by. And on cold, cloudless nights, the northern lights would be spectacularly clear, flashing and dancing across the sky. It was a sight that Frankson said still seems too incredible to be real — even after years of observing it.
But climate change is threatening all of this.
Alaska is warming up to three times faster than the rest of the world, and the Arctic is warming nearly double that. Alaska’s North Slope, where Point Hope is located, saw an average annual temperature increase of 6 degrees since 1971. Since 1970, the US as a whole has warmed by 2.6 degrees.
Although the difference between, say, a day that is 0 degrees and one that is 5 degrees may seem like no big deal, the impact of these rising averages is immense.
Sea ice is forming later in the year than usual and is not as predictable as it used to be. As the permafrost thaws, siġlauqs — the traditional ice cellars carved into the land — are caving in or flooding. The animals that people rely on for food and goods — whales, fish, caribou — are also growing harder to find.
Despite the challenges, Frankson, who researches the social impact of declining caribou populations, says that Iñupiaq people are not going to change their entire way of life, but instead are making small adjustments to changing conditions. “We’re not scared enough to stop hunting, we’re not scared enough to stop going out on the ice, we’re not scared enough to do any of this,” she said. “We’re just learning how to adapt, as we always have.”
To adapt to the warming climate, Indigenous people in Alaska are relying on their deep understanding and respect for the land, a kind of humility developed over countless generations. “You can’t really change the Arctic,” Frankson said. “You can only change with the Arctic.”
Yes, daily life in Alaska — with its northern lights, its dependence on ice and the movement of caribou — may feel unrelatable. But this way of living in tune with the environment and gracefully adapting to a changing climate is becoming increasingly essential for the rest of the country. The strategies that Indigenous people in Alaska are developing show that sometimes the best forms of climate adaptation are achievable, local solutions.
Generations of extreme conditions have equipped Alaska Natives with the willingness and ability to embrace this kind of adaptation. As the impacts of climate change grow increasingly severe in the rest of the country, we could all learn from that.
Swimming may not seem like an adaptation to global warming. But in Alaska, it is.
Hundreds of miles south of Point Hope, in Bethel, Alaska, the Kuskokwim River is the heart of the community, providing food, transportation, employment, and community throughout the year.
The only way to get to Bethel is by plane, which can be very expensive, or by the river. In the winter, snow machines zip through town, heading up and down the frozen river to the dozens of villages that depend on Bethel for food, supplies, health care, and much more. In the summer, people travel by boat to spend days at their fish camps on the river, smoking salmon to eat throughout the rest of the year. In between, when the ice is forming or beginning to break up, the river can be dangerous: too frozen for boats, but too unstable for snow machines and cars.
“You can’t really change the Arctic. You can only change with the Arctic.”
Lately, those shoulder seasons have been shifting, extending, and becoming terrifyingly unpredictable.
Every year, flooding and erosion get worse, fish are dying, and the winter ice is becoming more dangerous. Kevin Whitworth, the executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, says declining salmon populations are especially concerning. “It’s hard times,” he said. “Our people are subsistence-based people. They’re not economy-based people. They rely on the river as their grocery store. Their life is the river.”
According to the Federal Subsistence Management Program, rural Alaskans harvest 295 pounds of wild food per person, more than the 255 pounds of domestic meat, fish, and poultry that the average American consumes per year. Fifty-six percent of the statewide subsistence harvest is made up of fish. Beyond its cultural and community importance, subsistence is crucial for Alaska Natives because of the high cost of groceries. In a study of 261 urban communities across the country, the Council for Community and Economic Research found that the three most expensive places for groceries were Juneau, Fairbanks, and Anchorage. Prices in more remote communities like Bethel are often even higher.
Salmon’s drastic decline can be attributed to a number of causes, including warming waters and increased offshore trawling. Every year, ocean trawlers fishing primarily for pollock catch, kill, and discard about 141 million pounds of salmon, halibut, and other species, an extraordinarily wasteful practice that Indigenous people and other groups in Alaska have been rallying against. Meanwhile, communities upriver are severely limited in the number of salmon they can take from the river. “Right now, the salmon are crashing and we’re seeing big changes with the climate,” Whitworth says.
Bethel Vice Mayor Sophie Swope, who also sits on the Orutsararmiut Native tribal council, says that river conditions have become more dangerous for fishing and travel. “It used to be pretty dependable that you could just go drive out during the winter and it would be fine and safe,” Swope said. “Now, you have to keep an ear out for what the river conditions are.”
Whitworth, who is Athabascan from McGrath, says that because of salmon’s increasing scarcity, people are taking greater risks to get fish even though the river ice forms later in the season and is less reliable, leading to accidents and drownings.
So, facing declining salmon populations and a dangerous river, Indigenous people in the region are shifting their norms, too. While chinook and chum salmon are restricted, sockeye salmon, a less traditionally popular and available fish, has become an increasingly viable alternative.
Chinook has been a staple of Indigenous subsistence diets for generations, but people are doing what they must to use what is available now. Traditional salmon fishing techniques make it hard to separate different species of salmon, so Whitworth and the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission have been encouraging local fishers to use dip nets, large circular nets that allow people to target sockeye.
In the commission’s 2023 end-of-season report, sockeye made up about 40 percent of the estimated total salmon harvest on the lower Kuskokwim, a number that Whitworth says is much higher than it used to be.
As warming continues to impact the river, the local community has also been taking steps to protect its people.
In 2014, Yup’ik elder Beverly Hoffman and others finally succeeded in a decades-long effort to build a community pool in Bethel, which is now a resource for people throughout the region to learn how to swim, preparing them for an increasingly unpredictable river. Hoffman and others recognize that they cannot control the river, but they can help prepare the community to survive its dangers.
Swimming lessons and dip nets might sound like tiny changes in the face of global climate trends, but these are the kinds of local adaptations that will help communities thrive in a warming world. Outside of Alaska, planting trees to create more shade in urban heat islands or hiring more lifeguards for public pools could have a similar impact.
But these solutions are within reach and meaningful; they literally save lives.
Such approachable adaptations mean understanding that although we have a limited ability to change the climate, there are many more options to change our own behavior.
“This is what Indigenous knowledge is”
As temperatures continue to rise, Alaska Natives are turning to intergenerational knowledge and community observations to build a wealth of data that they hope will urge non-Indigenous decision-makers to listen to what they have to say.
In Unalaska, the largest city in the Aleutian Chain, the Qawalangin Tribe is gathering community feedback on climate change and what the people are experiencing. The tribe will then use these observations to help develop its climate resilience plans, which include culture camps with traditional dances and classes on kayak making, traditional food nights, and water quality testing programs.
Vera Metcalf is the executive director of the Eskimo Walrus Commission, which represents 19 coastal communities. Metcalf says that Indigenous walrus hunters have adapted to climate change by participating in research projects led by agencies like the US Fish and Wildlife Service. “In the past, we were largely ignored in research occurring in our homeland and waters,” she said. “When you combine the two ways of thinking, it really becomes a rich resource of information.”
Changing With Our Climate: A limited series exploring Indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history — and the future
There’s no easy fix for the planet, but Indigenous people have simple solutions rooted in the depth of their knowledge. This story is the first installment of a new Vox series exploring frameworks for responding to extreme weather and the climate crisis. Every month through October, we’ll be publishing a new feature that centers an Indigenous community responding to various aspects of climate disasters, from major storms like hurricanes and typhoons, to extreme heat, rising seas, wildfires, and spreading aridity.
Roberta Tuurraq Glenn-Borade, Iñupiaq from Utqiaġvik, is the project coordinator and community liaison at the Alaska Arctic Observatory and Knowledge Hub, where she works with observers from four communities in the Alaskan Arctic.
Community observers share details like air temperature, wind speed, ice conditions, and animal observations, sometimes sending in photos of animals being harvested. Glenn-Borade and her team then take this data and share it with agencies like the US National Weather Service, which releases forecasts for the region. Glenn-Borade says that, historically, these forecasts prioritized larger ships offshore rather than Indigenous people living on the coast and hopes that using local observations will lead to better forecasts for Indigenous communities. “That kind of foresight of what the conditions will be can really make a difference between life or death,” she said.
Glenn-Borade also says this kind of local observation provides invaluable historical context about how the coast and the ice have changed over the years, what is within normal ranges, and what is unexpected.
“That’s what Indigenous knowledge is,” she said. “It is constant tracking and understanding and monitoring what’s going on and being prepared to respond on the fly.”
As the world warms, these examples from Alaska offer a warning that we can’t simply do everything the way we used to. Saudi Arabia, for example, can no longer ignore the deadly impacts heat is having on Hajj. Places like the Pacific Northwest can no longer count on mild summers and will save lives by investing in cooling infrastructure. But they also offer hope that if we can shift away from trying to change the environment to suit us, instead of the other way around, there may be a chance of finding creative, unexpected ways of changing with our climate.
When I spoke with Glenn-Borade recently, she told me she and her people are proud “that we’re still here. We’re not going to die off. Our languages aren’t going to die off. We will adapt. We’ll continue to adapt our lifestyles as the environment changes.”
Mom or Dad is at work all day, or out of the picture altogether. The spouse is at home taking care of the kiddos but needs to get out of the house to work or pursue an education. There is just one obstacle, but it is a big one – day care. In Alaska and throughout the nation quality day care is hard to find and expensive.
Imagine the issue resolved. Imagine that high quality day care is widely available and jaw-droppingly inexpensive at about $8 to $10 per child per day. Day care includes snacks and a hot lunch. It includes a ratio of 1 to 10, staff to children. And it includes basic health care.
The day care facility may be a new building specifically built as a fully equipped modern day care center, or it may be a local school building. It opens early and stays open late to accommodate elastic work schedules. Some day care facilities are open 24 hours a day, six days a week. At the end of the day, select day care centers send home an evening meal for the parent and children.
Impossible but tantalizing daydream? No, not a mere daydream — part of our American history. Parents demanded it. Politicians wanted it. And it was done. For a few brief years the United States had a generously funded day care program across the nation.
Early in the 1940s the United States had hurled itself into war against the Axis powers. The men were gone, engaged in the war effort. Graphics of Rosie the Riveter were everywhere, urging women to replace men in critical war industries. Maybe Rosie didn’t have children, or maybe she had a kindly mother who watched her children while she was hammering rivets. But millions of real women were alone at home with their children. How could they work full-time in war industries and be full-time mothers at the same time? As the New York Times reported in 2019:
“The major source of funding to remedy this came from the Lanham Act of 1940, which enabled a number of social programs during the war years. Beginning in 1942, the Lanham Act funded the Federal Works Agency to provide group child care in areas of ‘war impact.’ But far from instantly setting up a cheerful child care center on every block, the act created a complex patchwork of public and private entities, which in some cases sustained existing centers, and in others allowed communities to set up new ones.”
According to a report by the Congressional Research Service, even at the outset of the program the “need for the child care centers was estimated to be much greater than the services provided.” Nevertheless, it was an extraordinary accomplishment:
“The wartime child care programs were locally planned… Overall, as many as 635 communities across the nation were granted funds to operate one or more centers. Projects included programs for preschool and school-age children. In July 1944, when the wartime child care program reached its apex, 52,440 preschoolers and 76,917 school-age children were enrolled.”
By mid-1945 it was clear that the Allies had won the war. The prevailing male sentiment was that it was time for Rosie the Riveter and her female factory colleagues to pack up and go back home. They were urged to take their “traditional” place in the kitchen and give the factory jobs back to men. And to make sure the women did that, politicians immediately slashed funds for national day care, quickly dismantling the program. Pushback ensued. Women and children demonstrated in the streets. There were write-in campaigns, according to the CRS report:
“Approximately one month after this announcement, the FWA [Federal Works Agency] reported it had received communications from 26 states and the District of Columbia (1,155 letters, 318 wires, 794 postcards and petitions signed by 3,647 individuals), urging continuation of the program. Principal reasons given were the need of servicemen’s wives to continue employment until their husbands returned, the ongoing need of mothers who were the sole support of their children, and a lack of inadequacy of other forms of care in the community.”
Nevertheless, sexism and discrimination prevailed. Within a few short years most of the national day care program had been wiped out. Vestiges remained through the 1960s, mostly in California. Then the national day care program was entirely gone.
So here we are today. Day care woes abound. Tax breaks and other marginal incentives of today cannot build a national day care program. However, eight decades ago the Federal Works Agency did. We have the precedent and the need but lack politicians with the vision.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
News3 mins ago
Federal Reserve officials wanted ‘greater confidence’ that US inflation was cooling
World7 mins ago
Bulgaria's parliament votes down centre-right minority government
News22 mins ago
Democratic Rep. Doggett says Biden needs to drop out of the race or Trump will win
West25 mins ago
'Disc-shaped craft' hovers over Colorado concert venue, employees say: 'It knew it was being watched'
Midwest31 mins ago
Whitmer claims those who think Biden can’t win Michigan are ‘full of s—’
Midwest2 years ago
See it: Tesla crashes into Columbus convention center at 70 mph
Colorado2 years ago
Colorado Rockies game no. 116 thread: Zac Gallen vs José Ureña
South2 years ago
Fox News Politics: Georgia the whole day through
South2 years ago
Death of missing Oregon girl found in stream ruled homicide
South2 years ago
At least 2 dead as tornadoes hit Alabama, damage homes across Southeast
World7 mins ago
Bulgaria's parliament votes down centre-right minority government
News23 mins ago
Democratic Rep. Doggett says Biden needs to drop out of the race or Trump will win
Politics7 hours ago
Republican congresswoman charged with bringing gun to Virginia airport
World7 hours ago
More than 270 people arrested in antigovernment rallies in Kenya
News7 hours ago
Trump gets edge over Biden nationally and across battlegrounds after debate as Democrats’ turnout in question — CBS News poll
-
Politics1 week agoBiden official says past social media posts don’t reflect ‘current views,’ vows to support admin ‘agenda’
-
News1 week agoWoman accused of trying to drown Muslim child in Texas in possible hate crime
-
World1 week agoIsrael accepts bilateral meeting with EU, but with conditions
-
World1 week agoNetanyahu says war will continue even if ceasefire deal agreed with Hamas
-
Movie Reviews1 week agoMovie Review: “Casablanca” – A Timeless Masterpiece –
-
Politics1 week agoSupreme Court to review Tennessee ban of puberty blockers, transgender surgery for minors
-
News1 week agoSupreme Court to decide whether states can restrict gender-affirming care for minors | CNN Politics
-
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25500699/DSCF7644.jpg)
Technology1 week agoHow Apple is trying to make Final Cut Pro a “touch-first” video editing app