On the evening of August 21, 2025, Chris Giokaris hopped on the interstate heading southeast from his hometown of Tucson, Arizona. His destination was Benson, a town of about 5,500 people located 50 miles away. The small town is known as the gateway to the San Pedro Valley, in large part for the San Pedro River that winds its way north from Mexico as one of the last undammed rivers in the Sonoran Desert.

Editor’s Note: Reporting for this article was made possible by the Guerry Beam Memorial Reporting Grant award from the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources. On a sunny, 85-degree day in August, some 9,300 oysters were loaded into ice-filled containers on southern Maine’s Casco Bay. The boat shuttling them from the warm, shallow waters of Recompense Cove to the marina two miles away hummed quietly.

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week. A few weeks ago, I shared coffee with Mary Ignatiadis, a forest economist with…

Renewable energy experts and developers in Texas are warning that rural communities could bear the brunt of the economic impact from changes to federal tax credits for wind and solar put in place by the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) Act, President Donald Trump’s signature piece of second-term legislation. Texas, which ranks first in installed renewable energy capacity, is continuing to build out its fleet of wind, solar, and energy storage projects.

A coalition of nonprofits, tribes, and local governments is suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over the termination of $2.8 billion in environmental and climate justice grants for disadvantaged communities. One member of that coalition is located a few miles off the coast of the Bering Sea. The Native Village of Kipnuk (Qipneq), Alaska, is built on thawing permafrost. Qipneq means ‘bend’ in the Native Yup’ik language, referring to the village’s location along the meandering Kugkaktlik River.

Lexi Shelhorse is a seventh-generation resident of Pittsylvania County, Virginia, where she grows hay on family farmland in Whittles, a rural community in the southern part of the state. She can trace her lineage back to Johann Barnett Shelhousen, a German immigrant who arrived during the United States Revolutionary War in the 1790s and bought 150 acres of land that would be used by his descendants for growing tobacco and raising cattle.

Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to slow federal funding for building electric vehicle chargers across the country, the number of ports is growing, although rural areas are seeing less investment, per data from the EV charging data analytics firm Paren shared with the Daily Yonder. As of the first quarter of 2025, 45% of rural counties had at least one fast EV charging port installed, compared to 76.5% of metropolitan counties.