The Show for Aug. 3, 2026: Issues with WISeR and Medicare; 'Fierce Country' women and more

Arizona is among the states piloting a new program that uses AI to help determine if Medicare patients should get certain procedures or treatments. We’ll hear from a physician to see how it's been going. Plus, finding the stories of women trailblazers in the outdoors and conservation.

Transcript

MARK BRODIE: Hi, I’m Mark Brodie, co-host of The Show, an original production from KJZZ. Every weekday we bring you the latest news and culture from across the state. You can find much more at theshow.kjzz.org. Here’s today’s episode.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning and welcome to The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I’m Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, how Flagstaff officials are hoping to prevent wildfires on Mount Humphrey.

LAUREN GILGER: And why one musician is working to show there’s more to Detroit music than Motown.

MARK BRODIE: But first, the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services this year embarked on a new pilot program called Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction, or WISeR. Arizona is one of six states taking part in the initial rollout, which is scheduled to run through 2031.

The WISeR model uses AI, among other technologies, to help determine whether or not certain procedures or courses of treatment are appropriate for Medicare patients. Reporting from The Washington Post has found the rollout of the new system of prior authorization has not been smooth across all the states where it’s being used. And an effort by some congressional Democrats to repeal or defund the pilot recently failed.

My next guest has seen some of the problems with WISeR firsthand. Dr. Matthew Crooks is an interventional pain management doctor and director of Interventional Pain Management with OrthoArizona. He’s also president of the Arizona Society of Interventional Pain Physicians. He says before WISeR, he didn’t need to get prior authorizations for Medicare patients for minimally invasive procedures, although if CMS ultimately decided those procedures weren’t necessary, he may not get reimbursed for it. He also points out he and his colleagues are used to getting prior authorization for other patients, including those on commercial insurance.

I spoke with Dr. Crooks earlier and asked what his experience has been working with WISeR.

MATTHEW CROOKS: So when we initially first heard about WISeR coming up to be implemented, which was the summer of last year, I myself and I think a lot of the interventional pain doctor community here in Arizona, knowing that we were one of the states where the implementation was going to take place, we were relatively optimistic because we were kind of hoping that we would be involved in the process and that we recognized that in all of medicine and with limited budgets and resources with Medicare, that curbing any sort of waste or fraud is paramount. And as leaders of the field and the clinicians and specialists, we could help to take a forefront in that while still taking great care of our patients.

As we got closer to the implementation date of January 2026, some concerning things developed in that really we were kind of in the dark about it completely from when we first heard about it to basically the go-live date in January. So there was very little ability to prepare and to sort of meet expectations of the program.

After implementation, also, I would say it was pretty rocky across the board. There was a period of time when it was first implemented in mid-January where we were getting just a tremendous amount of denials of requests for authorization with the program.

MARK BRODIE: So is the biggest issue then that procedures that you would like to do for your patients are being denied on the front end, or taking a long time to get them authorized and delaying the care?

MATTHEW CROOKS: Exactly, yep. So that’s how things played out, especially early on. And we have — things have gotten better, I must say, but still, it is very different than it was prior to WISeR. It slowed down access to care. In some cases, it really shut down access to care. And when we went from a patient that when we saw them, we could get them the treatment that they needed within a week, even, it then dragged it out several weeks. And in the case of having denials of care, it would be even longer, or even not at all.

MARK BRODIE: Why do you think it is that you’re getting so many denials upfront?

MATTHEW CROOKS: So we question that ourselves. It wasn’t practice-specific to mine, or even talking with multiple different practices, it was pretty uniform. And we were basically following the same blueprint or playbook that we always had in terms of next step of care, and then now all of a sudden, the denials are happening. And so what we saw was there was a great disconnect between the third-party authorization company that we had in Arizona and Medicare itself.

Now, there’s different third-party authorization companies for each of the WISeR states. So there’s multiple states where this is — we’re kind of considered the test state or the rollout of this. And so kind of state to state it varied quite a bit.

MARK BRODIE: And to be clear, these are treatments that prior to WISeR had been approved?

MATTHEW CROOKS: Tried and true. Yes, so they didn’t require approval ahead of time, but for our sake, as the physician practice, there was no prior authorization requirement. But if we were not following Medicare guidelines, then we as physicians or as practice owners run the risk of getting the right procedure for the right patient clinically, but it’s not following Medicare guidelines. So then Medicare can either not reimburse us or reimburse us and then come back and take it back.

MARK BRODIE: What role do you think AI has played in what’s been going on with WISeR?

MATTHEW CROOKS: So that is the $64,000 question, right? Because they say that there is a human kind of over-reading all of the authorization requests. Definitely AI is baked into the cake and is, for transparency, part of the process that they are promising. And that should lead to potentially efficiencies, right? But the downside to it is that there are definitely aspects that we’re seeing that are clearly a computer. Our notes, our documentation notes requesting authorization are being fed through AI, and there are things — I will say that part of the reason why things have improved is because we’ve learned basically what we have to document that was different than before this. And so we’ve basically adapted our learning to what is required by AI. And clearly that there’s software that is, if you want to look at the glass as half empty, there’s software that is kind of dictating care in some ways.

MARK BRODIE: Well, it’s an interesting juxtaposition in some ways because while the federal government is using AI in this WISeR pilot, a number of states are passing laws specifically saying that AI cannot be used to deny claims or that kind of thing. So I’m wondering, just sort of philosophically, do you think there is a role for AI in this kind of thing?

MATTHEW CROOKS: I think that there is on both sides — on both the government side to, I mean, specifically to really, if they can fine-tune it. And unfortunately, we’re kind of in that pilot program phase in Arizona. But to look at it optimistically, we do want to be able to preserve these procedures for the patients for the right indications. And the government is operating within a budgetary constraint, and these can be costly, especially if they’re used in the wrong way or overused or abused.

So I do think that there is a role for AI to help weed out the bad actors and the overuse and potentially to recoup on the fraudulent side. But I think right now, the settings have been kind of overly aggressive. And AI is so new in general, I think it’s kind of a new tool that really needs to be fine-tuned in the proper way. The idea, I think, is that there is a person or a human kind of over-reading this or making sure that the denials are appropriate. And so hopefully that’s the case, and that may be what we’re seeing in terms of how things are getting better.

MARK BRODIE: So given all of this, I’m wondering what you make of the efforts in Congress by some to do away with WISeR and just scrap it altogether?

MATTHEW CROOKS: I did just see that, and I will admit that part of me was pretty excited about that. I do think that WISeR, when implemented correctly and if the proper guardrails and oversight are there for it, I do think that it could be a very valuable program. And I think from what I’ve heard from a couple of the other states where it’s been implemented successfully, more in the lines of like a Medicare Advantage plan type of authorization, I think that there is a pretty significant role for it in terms of curbing waste and fraud. So rather than scrapping it, more oversight to make sure that steps are taken to not be a barrier in access to care for patients, and that the right patients can get the right treatments that they need. So I think really just having that oversight will be helpful.

MARK BRODIE: All right. Well, Dr. Crooks, thank you so much for taking the time to chat. I really appreciate it.

MATTHEW CROOKS: Thanks, I really enjoyed it.

MARK BRODIE: Dr. Matthew Crooks is director of Interventional Pain Management with OrthoArizona. He’s also president of the Arizona Society of Interventional Pain Physicians.

MARK BRODIE: Some wine growers in California are struggling. The New York Times reports some wineries are ripping out or burning their grapes in response to lower sales. There are a number of theories as to why fewer people may be buying and drinking wine, from health concerns to price to taste.

With me now to talk about the situation for Arizona wineries is Pavle Milic, the co-owner of the restaurant FnB in Scottsdale and a winemaker with Los Milics Vineyards. Pavle, good morning.

PAVLE MILIC: Good morning.

MARK BRODIE: So are Arizona wineries in a similar situation? Obviously, on a much smaller scale than California, but is the situation kind of similar here as it is with our neighbors to the west?

PAVLE MILIC: Well, I think the story, it’s quite different in Arizona. Now, mind you, and I should contextualize it based on the history of the last three years. For example, in ’23, ’24 and, to a lesser degree, in 2025, we had amazing, bountiful harvests, which means this year I have heard of some growers that are not necessarily selling as much fruit as they have in the past.

But I’ve got to tell you, and I have to sort of bring in the context in the story of FnB, one change that we’ve seen, especially over the last two or three years, is not so much that the wine consumption, the wine purchases at FnB still sort of are at the top of the spear, but guests are beginning to ask more about nonalcoholic options, whether it’s things that we carry like Phony Negroni or Athletic Brewing.

But when it comes to Arizona wine, and specifically Los Milics Vineyards, we have not personally experienced sort of the bad news that we’re seeing coming from California and even other regions.

MARK BRODIE: Is it surprising to you what you’re seeing happening in California?

PAVLE MILIC: Well, I think that, especially being in the business, the news is not good. I will say this, and I have friends in California that are obviously — they know that there is a correction and there is a decrease in consumption. But conversely speaking, or at least in my experience, most of the wines that we produce at Los Milics are sold within state lines.

And by that I mean, in terms of scale, we’ve never had to sort of compete with — and again, this is a slightly reductive sort of explanation, but we never had to compete with places like California, Oregon, Washington, Finger Lakes, Europe or South America, for that matter, because Arizona wine, although anymore there’s over 156 federally bonded and licensed wineries, has always been a very close-knit, grassroots, sort of a local-vore, state pride sort of movement where you still get to experience the human scale to winemaking. And by that, I mean, invariably, if you go to a tasting room or a winery, you are going to meet the farmer’s calloused hands.

I think it’s, again, due to the nature of how most of the sales have sort of tracked since I can remember, since even opening up FnB 17 years ago, it’s been a pretty sort of local movement. So I think we’re still, you know, pretty well positioned. And I say that with more than a modicum of humility. You know, you have to stay — you have to try to stay sort of aware and see what’s going on and see if you need to pivot or what things you need to do.

MARK BRODIE: Well, I mean, is it possible for winemakers to pivot if, for example, people are looking for nonalcoholic drinks instead of the alcohol in wine? Like, is there a way that you or other winemakers can do that?

PAVLE MILIC: Well, when we talk about the nonalcoholic category, as I mentioned before, we do have guests at FnB that are requesting nonalcoholic offerings more so than before. It depends on who you talk to about nonalcoholic wine. It’s like a bifurcated conversation where some winemakers believe, like, why would you even want to do that? And when was the last time that you actually tasted nonalcoholic wine that was good?

And then there are some winemakers that actually see that there’s a demographic there that would love to still enjoy sort of the ritual aspect of popping a cork and sitting down without having to deal with, I guess, the aftermath if you overly imbibe, if you will. So it just depends on who you talk to.

For us at Los Milics, things that we try to do, it’s this idea of amalgamating experience, meaning the experience of enjoying architecture, offering food, by that I mean we have a restaurant in the winery, and service, and then trying to sort of double down on providing additional experiences, whether it’s something as interesting as Tarot Night or whether it’s yoga on the crush pad.

I think at the end of the day, the thing about wine is that it sort of levels the playing field. It brings people together. It’s about the conviviality that you create when obviously you pop a cork with friends.

But when we talk about this idea of the health aspects anymore that people are obviously concerned about, and at the heels of the surgeon general talking about that no amount of wine is good for you, which I thought was a bit of a draconian assessment.

And by that I mean to provide sort of an opposing framework or angle to this conversation, if we look closely at the work of someone like Dan Buettner in the Blue Zones, where we see this unusual amount of centenarians, for the exception of Loma Linda where Seventh-day Adventists don’t really drink, but everybody else does have a glass or two every day.

I think that when you talk about enjoying wine with food, and when there’s a sense of community, and when that’s coupled with eating a relatively speaking healthier diet and there’s movement and there’s community. I just don’t think you can silo the conversation to just "this is bad for you." I mean, it’s been around forever, and I don’t think wine is going to go away.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right, that is Pavle Milic, co-owner of the restaurant FnB in Scottsdale. He also is a winemaker with Los Milics Vineyards. Pavle, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

PAVLE MILIC: Thank you for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning. It’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, a Detroit bassist and music producer ruminates on what makes up the musical language of his hometown. We’ll hear from the performer who’s sharing the Motor City sound with Arizona audiences this week.

LAUREN GILGER: But our next guest this morning has spent her career in the outdoors. Heather Hansman spent years as a river guide and skier in Maine and then Colorado, living her life in the outdoors and loving it. But she never had a lot of women to look up to — heroines whose stories she could emulate in recreation and conservation. So she found them and wrote about their trailblazing stories in her newest book. It’s called “Fierce Country: The Untold Story of Three Women Who Ignited America’s Love for the Wild.” And I spoke with her more about it.

HEATHER HANSMAN: Being a river guide was really like my first real job. I started guiding when I was 18. I went to college in Maine and there’s some really great rivers there and I worked there. And then I actually moved West because of a guy that I river guided with who got me a job in the mountains of Colorado. So those kind of — working on the river in the summer and then working on the ski mountain in the winter was sort of like my initial line into the outdoor world and the way that recreation and then kind of taking care of all these places really tangled together.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Yeah. OK, so in this book, which is your third, you are profiling three kind of trailblazing, no pun intended, women in the outdoors, right? You’ve got this Grand Canyon river runner, Georgie White, a powder skier, Dolores LaChapelle, which was very interesting, and also this ecologist and writer, Anne LaBastille. I want to talk a little bit about how you chose these women and what you were drawn to about each of them.

HEATHER HANSMAN: In some ways, I think — and there are so many women that I think I could have written about or talked about. One of the gists of the story is that we don’t tell hero stories about women in the outdoor world and they kind of get left out of the narrative. But these three women in particular kind of kept showing up in my life in ways that I didn’t even realize until after I’d kind of looked back on them. Dolores is in my last book, Georgie showed up in the research for my first book, which is about water in the West. So they’d been kind of like sitting below the surface in a lot of ways.

And then, you know, the book is about these women and they have these wild — they all have these totally wild adventure stories. Like, Georgie swam through the Grand Canyon before people were really rafting it. But they also have this kind of underlying line of taking care of the place. You know, Anne LaBastille was — she was a mountain guide, she was kind of taking people into the wilderness in upstate New York, but she was also an ecologist. She was pretty pivotal in the Clean Air Act. She had this endangered bird that she kind of ran this whole campaign to protect. They were really dedicating their lives to being outside and the physical side of things, but they also had this kind of like deeper ethic of care. So taken together, their stories kind of gave me this complete picture.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. And as you say there, you probably could have chosen a lot of women whose stories have not been told here. I want to ask about the story of Georgie White in particular, since this is an Arizona story and she was in the Grand Canyon. And you, you know, probably felt a personal connection to this one, right? As someone who has done river rafting in the past. Tell us about her. Like, swimming through the Grand Canyon is a pretty wild thing to do, and I’m sure back then it was as well.

HEATHER HANSMAN: I had heard about Georgie, you know, since I started guiding in Maine before I moved West. But even there, the Grand Canyon has this like mystique. You know, that’s like the place where it’s like the biggest, longest trip, the biggest water. So I kind of was hearing Grand Canyon stories from the get-go, and Georgie’s story kind of came up in that, but it was always as a novelty. Like, she had this larger-than-life persona. She was known — she always wore leopard print, she only hired, you know, hot firefighters as her guides. Like, she had this kind of like novelty things that she did.

So I kind of had heard that, and then as I started thinking about it more, and also, you know, one of the other underlying questions of this book was like, why didn’t I have heroes and role models and who could those people have been? And so I started really looking more into Georgie, and she was kind of this big personality. She was pretty bullheaded, but she also, you know, had been one of the first people down there. She was the only woman guiding down there for decades. She had taken the most people through the canyon for a really long time. Like, she was running trips more than anyone else. She was really pivotal in kind of thinking about tourism and how we promote getting people into wild places. I think because she — I mean, part of it was like, she just wanted to be down there as much as possible, and she figured out that if she guided people, she could go way more often. But she also really wanted to show people this place that she loved so that they could love it, too.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Yeah. I wonder, like, for all of these women, how radical was it for them to be in the outdoors in the way that they were, and like, how unheard of?

HEATHER HANSMAN: I mean, I think pretty dang unheard of. You know, the fact that Georgie was the only one down there for a long time working and guiding — and it’s not that there weren’t other people rafting or going on trips, but she was really the one — the only one running a business. And that feels pretty progressive to me.

And part of Anne LaBastille’s story is that she — she becomes a guide, and then she moved to this cabin in the woods and kind of like did all of her research there. She was like Thoreau, but actually living in the woods. And she — and that was like before women could get credit cards or, like, pay down a home loan living there by herself. So there’s all these sort of like micro barriers that they were facing along the way.

One of the other really interesting strands of this for me was like how much of this stuff still exists and how — how different and not different are things now.

LAUREN GILGER: Have you experienced that in your own experience as a river guide and as a woman, you know, in this field?

HEATHER HANSMAN: Yeah. And there have been many circum- — like, I was on staff at a magazine and I was — it was a skiing magazine and I was the only woman on staff. And what stories I was handed and what I covered was specific because of that.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So I mean, doing this, like devoting this book to these three women who, you know, did it anyway, did you find yourself some role models, even if it’s a little later on?

HEATHER HANSMAN: Yes. And also, I think, you know, part of what was really interesting about this is that these women are all really complicated, too. Like, Georgie, for instance, was something of a pathological liar. So that made the reporting for this really interesting because I had to kind of go back and fact check all of it. And people told me she was really exclusive to other women. You know, there’s — there’s also some like bad behavior, too. Like, these weren’t uncomplicated people. That made them sort of more interesting and more relatable in a lot of ways to me. I think so often it’s easy to like put a hero up on a pedestal and never want to hear about why they’re not great. And I think we’ve in the outdoor world, we’ve done that for a long time, and that’s sort of crumbled in the past, you know, 10 years or so since the MeToo movement, like we now know that somebody like John Muir wasn’t perfect. But I think like I’m really inspired by these people, and I also am kind of like — I feel like they have given me — they’ve shown me like the pieces of how I want to build a life outside.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. All right. Heather Hansman, freelance writer, author of the new book “Fierce Country: The Untold Story of Three Women Who Ignited America’s Love for the Wild.” Heather, thank you very much for coming on The Show. Thank you for telling us about yourself and about the book.

HEATHER HANSMAN: Oh, thanks. It was so fun to talk to you.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning. It’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Mark Brodie.

LAUREN GILGER: And I’m Lauren Gilger. As wildfires are burning across the country, Flagstaff officials are looking to prevent that kind of catastrophic damage from happening here. And how do they do it? By cutting down trees — a lot of them.

So federal and local officials in Coconino County are in the process of thinning out overgrown forests. Now they’ve got trees in 1,500 acres near Snowbowl on the San Francisco Peaks in their crosshairs. Jay Smith is Coconino County’s forest restoration director, and he’s on the line now to tell us more about their efforts. Good morning, Jay.

JAY SMITH: Good morning.

LAUREN GILGER: Thank you for coming on. So tell us first about these efforts to thin forests near Flagstaff. I was up in Flagstaff earlier in the summer, and you can really notice this. There seem to be a lot of efforts to thin forests where you’re cutting down trees here and there underway.

JAY SMITH: Yeah, we’ve been working at this for several years now, and really had a slow start going through from 2010-12. And we lost all of our industry, basically, our forest industry, and now it’s starting to come back, and so we’re really moving things forward. And we did a lot of modeling of this area, the Upper Rio de Flag Watershed north of Flagstaff, and really saw that there’s a huge wildfire risk, but then the post-wildfire flooding that comes from that as well.

And so the county got involved through our flood control district working with Coconino National Forest and other entities on other parts of that. If you drive up Highway 180 going towards Grand Canyon, you’ll see a huge change in the forest structure because we’ve done a lot of thinning.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So, I mean, you can tell, right? Like you can drive down a road in parts of Flagstaff and you’ll see a forest that’s been thinned on one side of the road and one that hasn’t on the other side of the road, and the difference is so stark. It always seems counterintuitive, but explain this for us, Jay. Like, fighting wildfires for a century has left our forests unhealthy. There are too many trees, right?

JAY SMITH: Exactly. And what we’ve done is we’ve created our own problem by putting all the fires out. This is a fire-adapted ecosystem. Fire is what kept the forest thin for centuries, and then we came in and said, “Let’s put the fires out,” and now we have too dense of a forest.

And so we’re trying to bring it back to a little bit of that natural. So whether we can reintroduce fire, good fire, into this ecosystem and keep it thinned, but we have to go in and mechanically thin first, because to start a fire right now in a lot of these areas would just be disastrous in our own way of trying to fix the forest. So thin it first, then we can go back in and reintroduce fire.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. So like a fire starts in a forest that has not been thinned, and it’s just going to take off like — like wildfire, I guess, right? But what happens in a forest that has been thinned? It’s more controllable?

JAY SMITH: Yeah, it stays on the ground like it’s supposed to. It doesn’t get up into the canopy very often, and the trees are adapted for that. Those larger diameter trees are adapted for this fire, and we call it a cool fire because it just stays on the ground, it creeps around.

But anytime we have these hot days where it’s low humidity, high winds, those are disastrous days for fires to start. But having it in a thinned forest — we saw this in the Pocket Fire when it came up through and hit some of the thinned areas, that’s where they were able to control and stop the fire, the forward progress of the fire.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So tell us about where you target for thinning around Flagstaff. Like is it near homes, is it near the city, is it — obviously we’re talking about an area you’re aiming to thin near Snowbowl on the mountain. No one wants to see the San Francisco Peaks up in flames.

JAY SMITH: Yeah, we have — so we’ve done a lot of work in the city of Flagstaff, done a lot of work around the community itself, and we’re still looking and looking at communities and we have a Community Wildfire Protection Plan that’s putting in place to help communities.

But what we’re looking at from a flood control district is we’ve — we’ve dealt with the Schultz Fire, the Pipeline Fire, we’ve had the Museum Fire, massive post-fire flooding where we’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars in trying to get the watershed back to where it won’t flood communities and homes.

And so we’re trying to be proactive. We got into the Upper Rio de Flag and said, “Let’s start thinning it before we have that.” We know it’s not if — it’s when this fire will happen. And so we want to be ahead of that, and we want to have this area thinned and where we can, you know, not just thinning the trees, but now there’s a lot of dead and down trees that fuel that fire on the ground, and we pull that out as well and really get it back to a more natural state.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. I mean, one of the issues here has been how to pay for this, right? Like, a massive amount of forests that need thinning, but also there’s been no real industry for this. There’s no market for the trees in Northern Arizona, right? How are we funding this?

JAY SMITH: Yeah, a lot of it is coming from local and federal tax dollars. This project specifically in the La Rue area that we’re calling, it’s being mostly funded by the flood control district, so local property taxes are funding it to the tune of about $4.2 million, about $500,000 of federal money put into this.

So, I mean, it’s not cheap to do. This is a more difficult area. It’s steeper, it’s got a lot of rocks in it, so it’s more specialized equipment from the local logger that has the contract.

So we’re, you know, we’re willing to invest that when we know that on the opposite side, if it burns and floods — we did the research, and Northern Arizona University’s Economic Policy Institute did this for us — it’s $2.8 billion of economic impact if we just let it burn.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. So you feel like you have to do something, but it does feel like something of a ticking time bomb, right? Like, are you really up against the clock here in terms of when and if that wildfire starts?

JAY SMITH: Yeah, a lot of sleepless nights during lightning storms and recreation times where we want to make sure that we get this ahead of any wildfires. And we’ve thinned about 12,000 acres now in this 21,000-acre watershed, so I am sleeping a little bit better at night, but I’m ready to get this last little piece here done.

And then a lot of it, we have 5,000 acres of wilderness in this watershed, and those are where we can’t get equipment into those areas, and so there’s still going to be some risk, but we have really reduced that risk.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. All right, we’ll leave it there for now. Jay Smith, Coconino County’s forest restoration director, joining us. Jay, thank you for coming on The Show. Appreciate it very much.

JAY SMITH: Thank you so much.

LAUREN GILGER: As climate change becomes more of a lived reality for us all, more of us are experiencing climate grief, a sense of loss and existential anxiety about what’s to come. Well, a new breed of spiritual caregivers are stepping in to help, and they’re called eco-chaplains.

The care they offer is for anyone from those who are involved in the climate world, like environmentalists, activists, community organizers, the journalists who cover it, or even disaster survivors. Think of it as landing somewhere between professional pastoral care and spiritual practice.

Nikayla Jefferson is one of them. She’s a Buddhist eco-chaplain as well as a writer, and she wrote about eco-chaplaincy for Yale Climate Connections. I spoke with her about it earlier this year, and she told me her story with eco-chaplaincy began in 2019, when she was working as an organizer for the Sunrise Movement, a political action nonprofit focused on climate change.

NIKAYLA JEFFERSON: When you’re working on an issue like climate change, it’s not long before the existential elements really begin to sink in. And I found myself really for the first time grappling with something like mass extinction and the end of life as I know it. And I was, you know, I’m 29 now, I was 22 at the time, and there was just felt like no ground beneath my feet. I felt like there was no place I could go to sort of like process this grief and kind of come to terms with things. So I had a spiritual crisis of sorts. And through the journey of that, that’s how I found this program, and finding an inner commitment to help others who are having some spiritual, existential challenges stemming from this transformation of our of our planet that we’re experiencing right now.

LAUREN GILGER: So it seems like you discovered this maybe sooner than most folks, because this is, you know, becoming I think more recognized now, this idea of climate grief that you’re describing, this existential crisis that many of us are trying to grapple with. I don’t think most people kind of identify what that is. How did you — how did you come to terms with it? Like when you started studying this, have you resolved this for yourself, or is this ongoing?

NIKAYLA JEFFERSON: No, this is absolute — I don’t know anyone who’s resolved it. It is a lifelong journey, you know, one I’ll be in for as long as I’m a human on this planet Earth. But I feel like now I’ve arrived in a place where I feel grounded and safe and secure enough in myself and the people around me and this land that I’m on and my home, that I feel a certain degree of confidence that I’ll be OK, kind of no matter what heads my way.

LAUREN GILGER: So let’s talk about being an eco-chaplain and what this looks like in this kind of emerging field that seems pretty small still. I think it’s interesting that this is coming as like a religious or spiritual kind of guidance as opposed to like from the counseling psychology world in a more secular way. And it seems like this is, you know, an interfaith practice.

NIKAYLA JEFFERSON: What I love about eco-chaplaincy is we’re really just trained to be really great spiritual friends to whoever may come our way in need. And I think we all sort of make use of our individual gifts and abilities and lean into whatever life experiences that we’ve had up to this point. So, I mean, some people lead like nature-based workshops for groups, may guide like an earth-based meditation, leading a ritual or ceremony. And this can, you know, be from like a wedding day up to like honoring a landscape that was lost after a wildfire. People may show up and support activists and organizers as they’re, you know, working on a campaign or a protest. Eco-chaplains really just go wherever there is a need and they show up as a spiritual friend the best they can. And it looks different for everybody.

LAUREN GILGER: So talk about what it is that you hear from folks who seek out this kind of care. Are they depressed, are they anxious?

NIKAYLA JEFFERSON: Yeah, I think there are some people who are really aware that their anxiety, their grief, the distress, the pain that they’re in right now is related to climate and ecological changes. But there are some people who are carrying pain and grief that is related, but they’re unaware. I was talking to Chris GoTo-Jones, who’s in this piece. He’s a psychotherapist and also a chaplain of the traditional variety. But he was telling me that a lot of his clients may come in about something, you know, about a relationship or a job. And when they begin to unpack the grief or the anxiety or like a sense of loss, climate change is like lingering somewhere in the background. And he told me that, you know, once he kind of names and normalizes, you know, eco-anxiety or grief, it really gives people the space to open up about it in a way they felt like, you know, they haven’t been able to, either because, you know, maybe there’s a stigma around it, maybe they weren’t aware of it.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. That’s interesting. That’s interesting. One of the things that came to mind for me here when I was reading your piece, and also just kind of thinking about this topic, is that I know many people, I think around my generation, like the millennial generation, who have decided not to have kids and they’ll say because of climate change, you know, because they’re too scared about the future of the world. I mean, do you see things like that come up in conversation?

NIKAYLA JEFFERSON: I mean, yeah, I’m one of them. Absolutely. There’s just no right answer. And as an eco-chaplain, like I’m not there to give somebody an answer. I’m really just there to create space for them to find an answer for themselves.

LAUREN GILGER: So, I mean, do you mind telling us personally, when you think about, you know, the idea of having children, what does that bring up for you? And I’m sure those are common themes in the work that you do.

NIKAYLA JEFFERSON: Yeah. I mean, on one hand, like, you know, I really try to stay in the present. But when it comes to the topic of children, like I can’t help but jump like 40 years, you know, down the line here and and imagine for like better or worse what life could look like on this earth. And the imaginations, you know, they go both ways. Either we’ve really figured it out and we’re living in this time of like wonder and abundance and possibility, or things have taken a turn for the worse. And we’re living in a moment right now that I feel like it truly could go either way. So I feel like my answer to this question is really going to be shaped by whatever happens over the next like, you know, three to five years.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s really interesting. It does feel like a moment like that. So let me ask you then, like as you’re trying to, you know, hear people and be with them in these moments and help them come to their own conclusions about how they would like to address this issue, do you often try to encourage them to take action in small ways? I hear a lot of people say that with climate change, like, you know, do the things that you can do in your own community and that will help you feel better about this big existential problem, because it is in the end like not a problem that each of us individually can solve.

NIKAYLA JEFFERSON: Right. I’ll say as an eco-chaplain, I really try to hold not being prescriptive. You know, I don’t want to tell anybody what to do. I think when you try to tell somebody what to do, often you encounter walls. But I also think that, you know, doing something, it feels good. It’s empowering. Being with others when you’re doing something, you know, it feels even better. So I feel like oftentimes I don’t need to tell anybody to do that. I think if you allow someone to follow the wisdom within for enough time, I think a lot of people end up there eventually on their own. And when you arrive at something on your own, you feel so much more — it feels like your own truth. And I think people being grounded in their own truth and acting from that truth is — I think it’s one of the most beautiful things that I can do.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. All right. I think that’s a good place to end it. We’ll leave it there. That is Nikayla Jefferson, a writer as well as a Buddhist eco-chaplain, joining us to tell us more about that field. Nikayla, thank you so much for coming on The Show. Thank you for discussing this with me. I really appreciate it.

NIKAYLA JEFFERSON: Oh, thank you so much, Lauren. Great to be here.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning. It is The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. Detroit is about 2,000 miles from Phoenix. That may seem like a random fact, but for my next guest, it is extremely relevant. Don Was is a bassist. He’s also a music producer. He’s worked with artists like Bob Dylan, Elton John, The Rolling Stones and Bonnie Raitt, among others. He’s also the president of Blue Note Records, a jazz label.

But back to the distance between Detroit and Phoenix. He’s also leader of a group called the Pan-Detroit Ensemble, which, as the name suggests, celebrates the music of his hometown. The group is performing tonight at the Musical Instrument Museum and Wednesday night at La Rosa in Tucson. I caught up with Was earlier and asked how he describes the Detroit sound.

DON WAS: I think the Detroit sound is characterized by, first of all, a kind of raw honesty. The — to me, the leading exponent of the Detroit sound is John Lee Hooker. Everything you need to know about Detroit is kind of in his music. It’s — it’s really raw, but yet it — it grooves like crazy, you know? And you think it’s sloppy and it’s going to fall apart, but it never does. And he’s just conversational and direct, and he tells you what he’s thinking, and he — and he doesn’t hide it.

And I think that’s the key to Detroit music. It’s an honest population, you know? It’s a one-industry town. Everybody’s — well, certainly when I was growing up, everybody’s fate was determined by the success or failure that year of the auto business.

So it really was the kind of city where there was no point in putting on any airs, no point in being pretentious, because everybody knows who you are, where you’re coming from, and knows we’re all in the same boat. So the music kind of reflects that lack of pretension and lack of gloss.

MARK BRODIE: So when you are talking about and playing Detroit music and trying to introduce it to other people, do you find that you have to sort of get people to move beyond what they know about it in terms of things like Motown?

DON WAS: Well, let me put it this way: If I was teaching a Detroit musicology college class, I would definitely move everybody beyond Motown, which I love, you know? Motown’s incredible, but it’s a piece of a much larger picture.

But when we’re — when we’re playing, we just play, you know? We don’t think, "Hmm, what would a Detroiter play in this bridge?" You know, we — everybody in the band lives in Detroit, everybody in the band grew up in Detroit, everybody grew up listening to the same radio stations, playing in the same bars, playing for the same audiences with the same other groups of musicians. So we don’t really discuss how to Detroitize the music, we — we just kind of naturally — it’s the way we play.

I think the thing that makes it work and the surprise when we first put it together was that I would say in the first 10 to 15 minutes, you could tell that these nine people playing together had a character to their playing. That sound — it felt like we’d been playing together for a decade. But that’s just because we — we speak a common musical language.

[MUSIC CLIP PLAYS]

When that happens, you’d be well advised not to take it lightly, because it doesn’t happen too often in the course of a lifetime that you can build that deep of a musical conversation. So we were just rehearsing for one show, but by the end of the first day, it was, "Uh, maybe we should book a tour around that one show." And we’ve been pretty much moving around since — you know, for the last two years.

MARK BRODIE: Is that what you mean by "don’t take it lightly"? Like, don’t just do one gig, like make sure you can get this music to as many people as possible?

DON WAS: Yeah, absolutely, man. You have to — when fate smiles on you, you’ve got to recognize it and seize the moment.

MARK BRODIE: Why is it so important to you to get the music of Detroit out? I mean, you have done like everything and could probably do anything. So why is this so important to you?

DON WAS: Well, Detroit is important to me. It’s like not just like home, but like family. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but, you know, just a — it’s like parents who brag about their kids.

MARK BRODIE: You brag about Detroit?

DON WAS: I’m proud of where I grew up.

MARK BRODIE: In listening to some of the tracks, the thing that struck me was your use of horns, like a kind of a big sound, like a big, loud sound. There’s some jam breaks in there. I assume all of that is very intentional on your part?

DON WAS: Well, it’s the way it came out. You know, sometimes — sometimes you just accept the way things come out. This was how this band sounds playing these songs. I know where I’d like to take it. I’d like to get more intimate. I’d like to get — the next batch of songs that we record will hopefully be a little more personal.

Look, I think our goal ultimately is not just to promulgate the indigenous sounds of our hometown, but to make people feel something. At some point, you’ve got to be a real artist. You can’t just be a geography lesson.

[MUSICAL CLIP PLAYS]

I think it’s the artist’s role and responsibility to get under people’s skin and communicate something to them — a feeling that you have that’s going to register with them. Maybe not the same way you intended it, but in a way that helps them make sense out of a very chaotic and confusing life.

MARK BRODIE: Well, how do you try to do that? Because it sounds like, as you reference, the sound that you’ve come up with is very organic. So how do you try to maybe change what you’re doing, or have it evolve in some way to make it a little — maybe a little smaller, a little more intimate?

DON WAS: Write better songs. I joke, but it’s not a joke. I mean, that’s — what a good producer does. Good producer finds — makes sure you record good songs with — with good artists.

The thing has evolved so much over the last two years. When I I compare the shows we’re playing now to what we did two years ago, I’m real pleased at the the way the musical conversation among the band has deepened. And also the way our relationship with the audience has.

At first people were just showing up out of curiosity, like, "What the hell is this going to be?" And now they kind of know, and they interact. I can feel the difference, that they’re interacting. What we’re doing is registering, and we get energy back from the audience. When you get that kind of situation going, the audience becomes a member of the band. How they react actually impacts the next notes you choose to play. I actually don’t know a more exhilarating feeling in life than being part of that.

MARK BRODIE: Well, that sounds like kind of getting to what you’re trying to do with the audience — make them feel something, get them maybe more a little engaged with what you’re doing rather than just watching — watching the ensemble play.

DON WAS: Yeah, exactly right. I’m — I’ll be 74 in September, and I know that I’ve got, you know, if I’m lucky, 10 years of good fingers left. And I got a lot to learn, man. So there’s an urgency to the mission now. It’s like, I got to get as good as I can get on this instrument before — before my fingers start to fail me.

MARK BRODIE: Don Was is a bassist, music producer, and president of Blue Note Records. His group, the Pan-Detroit Ensemble, is performing tonight at the Musical Instrument Museum and on Wednesday night at La Rosa in Tucson.

LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for listening to The Show’s podcast. The Show is produced by Sativa Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah, and Ayana Hamilton. The Show was created by Jon Hoban, and our executive producer is Amy Silverman. You can find more of The Show and sign up for our newsletter at theshow.kjzz.org. You can also find us on Instagram @kjzztheshow.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created for audience accessibility. Transcripts are created on deadline with the assistance of AI tools and then edited, and may not be in their final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio segment.