Kirk Siegler
As a correspondent on NPR's national desk, Kirk Siegler covers rural life, culture and politics from his base in Boise, Idaho.
His beat explores the intersection and divisions between rural and urban America, including longer term reporting assignments that have taken him frequently to a struggling timber town in Idaho that lost two sawmills right before the election of President Trump. In 2018, after the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history, Siegler spent months chronicling the diaspora of residents from Paradise, exploring the continuing questions over how – or whether – the town should rebuild in an era of worsening climate-driven wildfires.
Siegler's award winning reporting on the West's bitter land use controversies has taken listeners to the heart of anti-government standoffs in Oregon and Nevada, including a rare interview with recalcitrant rancher Cliven Bundy. He's also profiled numerous ranching and mining communities from Nebraska to New Mexico that have worked to reinvent themselves in a fast-changing global economy.
Siegler also contributes extensively to the network's breaking news coverage, from floods and hurricanes in Louisiana to deadly school shootings in Connecticut. In 2015, he was awarded an international reporting fellowship from Johns Hopkins University to report on health and development in Nepal. While en route to the country, the worst magnitude earthquake to hit the region in more than 80 years struck. The fellowship was cancelled, but Siegler was one of the first foreign journalists to arrive in Kathmandu and helped lead NPR's coverage of the immediate aftermath of the deadly quake. He also filed in-depth reports focusing on the humanitarian disaster and challenges of bringing relief to some of the Nepal's far-flung rural villages.
Before helping open the network's first ever bureau in Idaho at the studios of Boise State Public Radio in 2019, Siegler was based at the NPR West studios in Culver City, California. Prior to joining NPR in 2012, Siegler spent seven years reporting from Colorado, where he became a familiar voice to NPR listeners reporting on politics, water and the state's ski industry from Denver for NPR Member station KUNC. He got his start in political reporting covering the Montana Legislature for Montana Public Radio.
Apart from a brief stint working as a waiter in Sydney, Australia, Siegler has spent most of his adult life living in the West. He grew up in Missoula, Montana, and received a journalism degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
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Kemmerer, Wyo., is on the front line of America's energy transition, with its coal plant slated to close and a nuclear plant in the works. But some think the rush to quit fossil fuels is impractical. -
Environmentalists are suing Utah to force water cutbacks to farmers to save the Great Salt Lake. Farmers call the blame unfair and say that would have its own environmental and economic consequences. -
A U.S. appeals court struck down a judge's 2022 order that imposed a moratorium on coal leasing on federal lands. -
A mild and dry El Nino winter in parts of the West is stirring anxieties about the looming wildfire season, just as federal agencies are struggling to fill firefighting jobs.
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A mild and dry El Nino winter in parts of the West is stirring anxieties about wildfire season, just as federal agencies are struggling to fill firefighting jobs.
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The Biden administration is unveiling new, stricter pollution standards for American cities such as Salt Lake City, Utah, which have long struggled with chronically dirty air. -
Recent winter storms failed to produce the snow that farmers, cities and skiers rely on in much of the west. It's stirring climate change fears in snow-dependent economies.
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For years, Wyoming has had one of the highest suicide rates and one of the highest gun ownership rates in the United States. But until recently, it was taboo to draw a link between those two things. -
In Utah, lawmakers are convening amid mounting pressure to enforce tougher conservation laws to save the imperiled Great Salt Lake.
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Wyoming closed 2023 as the state with the highest gun suicide rate. Mental health professionals are seeing some positive change in response and prevention efforts.
