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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As the nation's first ever indigenous cabinet secretary, Deb Haaland has made it her priority to right the US government's historical wrongs in Indian Country, a monumental task that's not been without controversy. -
More than a million acres of rangeland have burned in Oregon this summer. At times the wildfires barely made headlines, but ranchers say the economic fallout will be huge. -
Montana used to vote consistently purple, but now there's only one Democrat holding statewide office, three-term U.S. Senator Jon Tester. He's not exactly embracing his party this election cycle. -
A new study found that the drying Great Salt Lake in Utah is now a major source of the gas emissions that are causing the climate to warm. -
As Ruidoso, N.M., starts recovering from a deadly wildfire, people who survived the state's largest fire two years ago say FEMA still isn't giving them what they need. -
President Biden dramatically expanded two national monuments in California. But there are growing concerns that federal land managers are struggling to manage existing monuments designated since 2016. -
The White House wants a twenty-fold increase in geothermal energy production to fight climate change and it's counting on the oil and gas industry for help. -
Half of the Great Salt Lake in Utah has now dried up but scientists say there's still some time left to reverse its decline. -
A U.S. Forest Service burn boss was due in court on charges stemming from a controlled burn that spread onto private land in 2022. His attorneys are trying to move the case to federal court. -
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.
