Last Tuesday night, just before 6 PM, a line stretched out of the downtown Gateway Community College campus onto the Church Street sidewalk. Over 250 people were waiting to file into the college cafeteria for the New Haven Mayor Social Justice Debate, where six out of seven mayoral candidates seeking to win the September 10 Democratic primary election were sharing their views on a range of social justice topics.

In New Haven, a city effectively segregated along class lines, it should come as no surprise that a debate on the future of justice and social disparities would draw such interest. New Haven is home to Yale University, an institution with an x billion endowment — yet the city also has a poverty rate of 26.7 percent, the second highest in Connecticut. According to a 2011 publication from the Connecticut Center for a New Economy (CCNE), over $1.5 billion in private development in the past decade or so has spurred New Haven’s “renaissance” of restaurants, businesses, and condominiums.  However, the rising tide of revitalization has not lifted all boats: CCNE points out that this renaissance has not remedied ongoing poverty challenges, such as unemployment, the rising cost of housing, or wage rates that are inadequate for basic living expenses in New Haven.

New Haven is afflicted by a litany of social justice challenges. The rate of home ownership in New Haven is 31.6 percent, the second lowest in the state, and the national foreclosure crisis hit the city hard.  Median income has not increased much over the past 10 years, even though per capita income  has increased substantially in the same time — suggesting that the city has grown both wealthier and more unequal. New Haven’s high school graduation rate in 2012 was a fairly low 70.5 percent, although up from 58.1 percent in New Haven in 2009. The city’s crime rate is more than double the national average, and closely concentrated in certain neighborhoods.

The six candidates participating in the debate addressed many of the above themes as they fielded eight questions from four local organizations: New Haven Legal Assistance, Christian Community Action, Junta for Progressive Action, and Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS).  These four groups asked questions related to affordable housing, government transparency, bilingual health services, law enforcement relating to juveniles, the need for living wage jobs, personal accomplishments relating to social justice, geographic inequalities in city services, and wage theft.

Creation of living wage jobs and job training was a recurring theme in the comments of many candidates. Sundiata Keitazulu, a Newhallville plumbing business owner, repeatedly emphasized the need to develop a skilled workforce, and advocated for creating vocational schools and training centers to achieve this end – also controversially noting that jobs should go to citizens before immigrants. Justin Elicker, East Rock alderman and graduate of the Yale School of Forestry and the Yale School of Management, highlighted the need to invest in underserved areas of New Haven such as Dixwell and Whalley Avenue, and suggested improving the city bus system on the grounds that public transportation is among the largest barriers to employment. Henry Fernandez noted the necessary expansion of healthcare workers in the city to serve the growing elderly population, and stressed the importance of building capacity so that new jobs can go to New Haven workers. Matthew Nemerson proposed enhanced connections between the Yale community and the “opportunity community,” including a buddy system, and saw his primary responsibility as mayor as competitively attracting billions of dollars of investment to New Haven.

Another prominent theme in the debate was affordable housing. Hillhouse High School principal Kermit Carolina suggested reviewing all policies to see how they impact homelessness. Fernandez cited his affordable housing experience on the Obama-Biden transition team at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and prioritized the need for accessing federal and state government resources to build new affordable housing in every neighborhood in New Haven. CT State Representative Gary Holder-Winfield talked about his work as a social justice activist on issues of poverty, education, and immigration. (A seventh mayoral candidate, CT State Senator Toni Harp, was unable to attend the debate.)

Elicker, who spoke passionately about the importance of transparency and making government immune to big money, is one of four candidates participating in the New Haven Democracy Fund, which is intended to help level the financial playing field among candidates. Under the terms of the Demoncracy Fund, Elicker and the other participants — Holder-Winfield, Keitazulu, and Carolina —  agree to comply with restrictions on fundraising and campaign spending, including a cap on the size of individual donations; in turn, the Democracy Fund provides public matching funds.

Although the debate covered a wide range of topics, it wasn’t quite comprehensive: points of overlap between social justice and the environment, and the potential to improve both simultaneously, went unmentioned. The debate could have covered access to healthy food and green space, infill development in brownfields and vacant lots, and the potential to weatherize and improve energy efficiency in affordable housing developments to help residents save on their energy bills. Hopefully an upcoming debate — Sunday, May 19^th, on the topic of economic development — will touch upon some of these concerns.

Introduction to the FES Summer Blog

Hi FES!

Welcome to the FES summer blog. This blog will be shared by all of FES, our  families, friends, and the readers of Sage to serve as a central place for sharing updates and stories as our summers unfold. Ideally, we’ll get a bunch of FESers to post to this blog, sharing travel stories and experiences as they begin their internships or go about their summer research.  No formal commitment is needed ahead of time, and you can post as much or as little as you’d like (though we will encourage you to post more than once, so we can get a fuller picture of your summer work).

I know most of you have pretty awesome summers lined up, with travel and internships and research projects. I’m hoping we can use this blog to share our stories as they happen (instead of just giving each other the broad brushstrokes when we come back in the fall), stay in touch, learn from each other’s experiences, and, in the end, have a platform that showcases the range of interests and work at FES.  (If this goes well, it could also be a great resource for incoming first-years starting to think about their summers.)

Anyway, we’d love it if you could contribute. Details and submission instructions are below.

Safe travels, and have a wonderful summer!

Tess (MEM’14)

• Send submissions to sagemagazine@gmail.com.
• No formal commitment to be a blogger is needed, and you can send a first post at any point during the summer (though we’d love it if you started early and wrote more than once!)
• Blog posts can be as short or as long as you’d like
• This blog will be informal—we are not looking for polished submissions
• Content can range from personal/non-work related (i.e., travel or vacation stories), or can, for example, detail the steps and setbacks of setting up a research project. Ideally, we’d have some of both!
• Comments on posts will be greatly encouraged

Behind Carmen, evidence of Goldcorp Inc’s impact on the land.

Last month, the Environmental Film Festival at Yale welcomed directors JT Haines and Andrew Sherburne for the world premiere of their documentary Gold Fever. The film details the arrival of Canadian gold mining giant Goldcorp, Inc. to the remote village of San Miguel Ixtahuacán, Guatemala, and the conflict that ensues.

Centered on the struggles of three women — Diodora, Gregoria and Crisanta, — Gold Fever is also a tale of North-South relations, historical American intervention in Central America, inter-community dynamics, and the high price of development. The film seamlessly weaves the three women with commentary from observers such as human rights activists Grahame Russell, MIT professor Noam Chomsky, and John Perkins, author of Confessions of An Economic Hitman.

Apart from detailing the community’s divided response to the development Goldcorp brings, the documentary also ponders the true value of an element that has been mined and sought for centuries. This discussion is particularly timely with the recent decline in gold’s price, a drop of 15.6% this year alone. In the days before and after the world premiere, headlines were filled with economist conjecture, producer forecasts, and even the benefits of a sudden price drop for Indian brides.

Sage writer Adedana Ashebir sat down with Haines and Sherburne before the world premiere of Gold Fever to hear more about the filmmaking process, the heroism of their protagonists, and how actions in the United States lead to consequences in Guatemala.

Sage: How did you get involved in this story?

Andrew Sherburne: The interest in this film started way back in the 1980s when our third director, Tommy Haines, went to Guatemala as a kid. There’s been a connection to the country since then.

JT Haines: I had my first trip to Guatemala in 2005. It was on a delegation to a mine-impacted community and I was really touched by the story. It really hung around with me for a few years. The mine was getting up and running, and when we had an opening in our filmmaking production schedule, I invited Andrew to come with me in 2009. We both went and did some test shooting and found the story as compelling as ever.

Diodora is among the activists fighting to prevent Goldcorp from despoiling their lands.

Sage: What did it take to get Gold Fever made?

AS: The film was in production over the course of total four years but it was probably two and half years of really heavy lifting. We had film crews visit a handful of times, as well as local videographers who were there every day on the ground to piece together the narrative. So in that sense it was a cooperative effort.

Sage: What were the challenges to making this film?

JH: There are three big ones. And for all the aspiring filmmakers out there, you want to keep an eye on these if you’re considering a project like this. Language, money and geography were all huge challenges for us in addition to the usual challenges, which are access, trust and relationships, equipment, etcetera etcetera.

Sage: There are a lot of issues in the film to unpack: indigenous rights, multinational corporate social responsibility, historical American intervention, community dynamics, economic development, just to name a few. Take us through some of the choices you made to tell this story in the way that you did.

AS: First and foremost, we had a responsibility to the people of San Miguel Ixtahuacán to tell their story as they’ve experienced it on the ground. But then we also wanted to connect it to all those issues that you mentioned. There are so many factors that have created the situation that exists in Guatemala today. We wanted to connect the dots from what is the experience for these people in their day-to-day lives to the grand, macro-economic global issues that have created this environment where the company can operate the way it does and these people have to deal with the consequences.

It was a big challenge because we are trying to juggle those two points of view, but ultimately I think it was important, something we had to do to connect to North American audiences. We had to come at it from both angles to help them understand.

JH: We certainly had to make some choices about what to cover. As you noted, there are many interconnected, very complex issues and we had to absolutely touch on some and let the audience’s own experiences inform their opinions. For example, we weren’t able to get into the details about some of the water pollution aspects nearly as much as is available from university research and NGO testimonials. We had to make quite a few choices like that as to what we could fit in the movie in a digestible manner without losing sight of the key story.

Sage: The story of Goldcorp Inc. and Guatemala is not a new one. You can easily switch out the commodity and the country and it’s almost the same story. So what is it about this particular story that was compelling for you both?

Andrew Sherburne

AS: I think any good narrative requires compelling characters, and so in our case that was a huge part of why this was an important and compelling story. It’s because the three women that were the heart of our story in San Miguel Ixtahuacán were just amazing people and their stories were really impactful. A huge part of it was discovering our central characters and wanting to bring their stories to the big screen.

JH: You’re absolutely right: This story is almost a universal story. Some of the challenges that are being experienced in Guatemala and especially San Miguel Ixtahuacán are being experienced in different ways and different points on the spectrum all over the world, including in our own country, which is one of the points that Magali Rey Rosa [columnist at Guatemala’s Prensa Libre] makes in the movie.We’ve got resource extraction issues, corporate ownership issues and democracy issues in our own country.

What’s interesting about gold in particular is that it has a very storied history, and the value of gold is a little harder to describe in that its not a commodity you can actually eat and burn. Do we need gold? One of the points several people made is that the gold we have — which is a lot — is mostly stored underground. So the process is apparently to get more gold from underground, bring it home and put it back underground.

Sage: Part of the film centers on the intimidation that the protagonists face during their fight with Goldcorp Inc. Did you as filmmakers face similar threats?

AS: We’ve been fairly obviously surveilled a couple times. But we’ve also been told that we’re safer because we’re North Americans — that the extra profile gives us a bit of cover. It’s a sad commentary that the reverse means people who are most engaged, within the community, would have more to fear.

Sage: What is the most powerful scene in the film for you?

JH: I really like the scene where we first meet Diodora on her land – we first see her with her granddaughter and the pigs enjoying a laugh, and then we see her reflecting with sadness about what it would mean for her granddaughter were she not around.

AS: The sequence that strikes me with a sort of quiet power is Diodora recovering from being shot, waving goodbye to her doctors, and walking out of the hospital, combined with her return to her land. That short sequence captures her fearless resilience in the face of overwhelming odds, and speaks to the spirit of the community as a whole.

JT Haines

Sage: There is a bit of hope toward the end of the film that’s then squashed at the end with the revival of the mine.  What can audience members who are compelled by this story do after they leave the theater?

AS: I think there are a lot of ways that people can stay on top of this issue and look further into it. As filmmakers our job is to represent the story as truthfully as we received it. We don’t want to put any false hope in there, but at the same time I do think that there is real hope. I like to say my hope is Gregoria’s hope at the end of the film. She is going to continue the fight, and that in itself is an act of perseverance. To get up the next day and continue on. Any time you are dealing with a struggle as monumental as what these people are facing down there, it’s an uphill battle, and it’s a fight you may never “win,” but continuing the fight is a victory in itself.

Sage: What can we expect next from Northland Films?

AS: One of the challenges with documentary filmmaking is that it’s such a long intense process, so when you commit to something it’s years you’re likely committing. There are so many good stories out there, so we do want to explore a bit before we lock anything down.

Hopefully this film has a long shelf life. I think there are a lot of people that would be interested in this. There are a lot of communities facing these same issues, whether it’s gold mining, silver mining, copper mining, nickel mining or a host of other things. To share this film again is a particular interest of ours. I hope [those communities] find some parallels. I hope it inspires them to keeping doing whatever they’re doing in their communities, to stay active.

JH: Are you familiar with the Lilla Watson quote? The indigenous leader. She says, “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting our time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” And I think that really effectively captures what we all need to be keeping in mind when we tell stories about places that are not our land, our community, our country. But they are our issues, and we are very much connected.

Sage: What message do you want the audience to leave with?

AS: More than anything I hope that we open their eyes to this story, which we think is an important one. We have an obligation to ourselves, especially in the global north, to be better informed about the world at large, because our actions have profound consequences around the globe. I hope that if people leave with one thing, it is a broader knowledge of how we are connected to the people of Guatemala. How this is our story.

JH: Look, we are not just the oppressors here, we are also the oppressed. We all live in the same global corporate environment. We can’t just look at these problems as other people’s problems; we need to start seeing them as our problems too. We’ve got foreign-owned sulfide mining in [my home state of] Minnesota. It’s a huge problem right now. We’re the land of 10,000 lakes, we have very vulnerable waterways, and it’s the same acid-bleaching mining process. We’ve got the same issues. I want people to see this movie and see how it connects home directly.

Gold Fever held its international premiere in Guatemala at the “memoria, verdad, justicia” Festival and was screened for community members in San Miguel Ixtahuacán. The film most recently competed at the Independent Film Festival of Boston. For more on the film and future screenings, please visit http://www.goldfevermovie.com/ 

Eriel Daranger, one of ELEMENTAL’s three very human subjects, during the Tar Sands Healing Walk.

Unlike most environmental films, Elemental does not push an agenda. Instead the film traces the stories of three characters, each working on different continents and on entirely different issues. Beyond environmentalism, what unites the protagonists is their fierce obsession with their respective causes.

As we hop back and forth between their stories, we are exposed to their unique character flaws. We watch, often uncomfortably, how all-consuming their quest can be, how insidiously the fights they participate in as environmentalists enter their personal lives.

Eriel Deranger, an Aboroginal woman from Northern Alberta, is passionately fighting against the Tar Sands development, though largely neglecting her teenage daughter in the process. Rajendra Singh, a hot-tempered, rogue Indian government official, makes a 40-day pilgrimage along the Ganges to rouse public support to save his country’s sacred river from waste and destruction.  And Jay Harman is a seemingly brilliant but aloof Australian engineer and inventor who has run his company nearly bankrupt. He is desperately trying to convince financial investors that his “atmospheric mixer” invention will both halt global warming and generate profits.

Before its screening at the Environmental Film Festival at Yale (EFFY 2013), I sat down with one of Elemental’s co-directors and co-producers, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee. We discussed why these three particular characters were chosen as subjects, the importance of an environmental film that focuses on the personal, human side of activism, and what it was like to film Robert F Kennedy Jr. drunk at a fundraiser.

Sage: Why did you seek out these three particular stories? What brought them together for you, considering each person worked on very different things in very different parts of the world?

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee: Well we were, in some ways, more interested with the people than we were with the issues they were involved in. We were interested in people who had a deep connection to nature which was deeply rooted in their own story … whether that was a personal story, like Jay [Harman], who found refuge in the ocean and nature from an abusive background. Or from Rajendra [Singh], who comes from a very ancient, cultural and spiritual tradition which sanctifies water, specifically the Ganges. Or from Eriel [Deranger], who comes from an indigenous culture that had a deep relationship to nature and grew up in the bush, where this understanding of nature being more than a resource was ingrained in the culture.

Rajendra Singh looks out onto the Ganges. He is one of the subjects of the film.

So having these aspects was key for us to show how these disparate stories could fit together. Also, we wanted people who were committed to a cause, sometimes blindly, so that we could follow a story that could show not just the external problems but also a very human struggle of people who were so committed to something that, perhaps, other parts of their lives fell under the table.

Sage: Why was this a film you wanted to make? Why an environmental film more about the characters involved than the issues they were involved in?

EVL: Our fundamental approach to this movie was to tell a story about our relationship to nature. But we wanted to tell a real story about these people … that it wasn’t just going to be using them to just pontificate about this or that. What we wanted was to be taken on a journey, through their lives, on a personal level.

And in a lot of environmental films, it seems the human aspect is left out. It’s a lot of facts and figures, and I think we’re numb to those facts and figures now, we turn off when we see them. But it’s harder to turn off when you’re watching real human beings.

If we can just show these are real people that are struggling to keep a family together, or struggling to be taken seriously, then people are going to say, “that’s something I can relate to, because I’m flawed too.” Then they ultimately have a stronger emotional connection with the issue, with the ideas, because they’re included in it.

Sage: So, are you coming at this from a place of being interested in the environmental issues and wanting to think of a new way to communicate them? Or are you coming at this from being more interested in characters, and the environmental causes are just a backdrop through which to explore some interesting characters?

EVL: I think … a mix of both. It started out more the former, and then during the journey of making the film, it became more the latter. So yeah, its really a mixture of both.

Sage: One thing that struck me was that there were some really intimate moments that you captured on camera, a few of which were quite uncomfortable to watch. One moment that jumps to mind is when Eriel Deranger is leading a protest against the Keystone XL Pipeline, and the camera has singled her out, and you’re just watching her argue with her daughter on the phone –

EVL:  – about hair products.

Sage: Exactly. Another is when Eriel Deranger is on a Skype call with her boss at the Rainforest Action Network, where she basically gets fired. So I’m wondering how did you gain this kind of access, and were the subjects comfortable with this?

EVL: So that scene you’re talking about at the protest was only the second shoot we had been on with Eriel. At that particular moment, at the beginning of that call with her daughter, we weren’t covering her. And I hear her start talking to her daughter so I signal to the cameraman,  “get over here, ” but I also didn’t want him to get too close. I wanted it to be a long lens shot, so you feel intimate but you’re not invading her space. So that was really a matter of luck.

Eriel Deranger

It was really one of the first moments where we felt the contradiction that she was in. And, you know, she talked about it with us afterwards off camera. She said, “You know we’ve all got to do this work and stop the Tar Sands, but sometimes I’ve just gotta be a mom. And sometimes it’s hard.  Sometimes it’s hard to just solve basic problems, when I’m trying to do all this stuff.”

And she didn’t have an answer, she was just sharing the trouble she was in.

Sage: The other scene I have to ask you about is the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. scene.

EVL: Oh that was great scene.

Sage: Yeah, I found it totally captivating, and also somewhat uncomfortable. I was hoping you could just briefly describe that scene and explain why you included it in the movie? What were you trying to show?

EVL: Sure. So firstly it’s a scene where Eriel is at a fundraiser for the Rainforest Action Network, in a fancy hotel, where there’s Bonnie Raitt, a bunch of celebrities, and one of the guest speakers is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is, you know, a very well known figure in the environmental movement for his work.  And he is introduced to Eriel, and he is talking to her, and it’s kind of inside baseball talk about how she should talk to this person or that person.

But RFK Jr. is drunk. And he kind of belittles her. He grabs her nametag to look at her. He interrupts her. He challenges her. He’s not necessarily a very nice guy. I don’t think he was aware of the camera there, because we shot on Canon 5D’s, which are smaller cameras. I think he thought it was just still photography.

We went back and forth about whether or not it was the right thing to include. Did it detract from the story? Was it even a story point? Ultimately I think it offers something very intimate about that world. And part of what we’re trying to do is show the inside of the life of these people who commit themselves to this kind of work, and what they have to go through, even among people in the NGO community. People don’t usually get to see that. I think a lot of environmental docs feature experts or the heroes but don’t show the underbelly.

Sage: The film will be screening at this year’s Environmental Film Festival at Yale. Many of the viewers are among the ranks of a new, modern environmental movement. What impression do you want to leave them with through your film?  

Jay Harman, inventor of the atmospheric mixer.

EVL: (laughs) The toughest question! I would shy away from saying this film is trying to do this or do that.  I would rather it be an offering. Take from it what you will.

I think, at least for me, there are some deep messages that we tried to convey about re-thinking our relationship to the natural world and the role it plays in our lives. The natural world is not just a resource, but that which “gives us sanity,” as Jay Harman says. Instead of saying, “let’s do this, this, and this,” it’s about taking a more philosophical or spiritual point of view about what kind of world we want to live in and the role nature plays for us in that world.

I think the more that people include those deep questions and ideas in the work they do, the better the chance we have at creating meaningful change.

ELEMENTAL, directed and produced by Emmanual Vaughan-Lee and Gayatri Roshan, is opening in select cities May 24^th, 2013 and will be available on iTunes and Tugg May 28^th, 2013.

(photo by Stephen Bailey)

The baby was born two months premature. Her mother was carrying bricks when she went into labor. The doctors and nurses worked through the day and night to save the child, clustering around her purple body, coaxing her lungs to take in enough air. Her oxygen level swung wildly, down to a low of 16 percent, then recovering, then falling again. Finally, only 20 hours after being born, she died.

Bhaktapur is a famous tourist stop in Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley, a world heritage site beloved by the Instagram generation, and a vibrant muddle of street life, alleyways, and temples. But for the families and children who live and work near its kilns, it is a rife with hazards. A sprawling and dense network of industry testifies to the grim story of pollution and rapid churn taking place in the developing world. About 70 kilns, all similar to the one where the baby’s mother worked, have come to mark the region’s urban perimeter, their chimneys spewing thick, black smoke. Another 46 kilns line nearby nearby Kathmandu and Lalitpur, each employing 500 people or more.

Women cross the polluted Hanumante river in Bhaktapur. (photo by Stephen Bailey)

Since the end of the Maoist insurgency in 2006, the Kathmandu Valley’s already rapid urbanization was dialed up. Its population has increased by 61 percent in the last decade. Migrant workers have fed the rapid shift. Rice paddies and fields have been replaced by development and industry. Rivers like the Hanumante, which flows through Baktapur, have become catchments for rubbish and sewage, turning gray and soupy. In Kathmandu, respiratory disorders occur at 12 times the national average.

The factories emit a toxic brew of particles and chemicals, including carcinogenic dioxins, particularly where rubber tires are used as fuel. Even at low levels these chemicals are linked to bronchitis, asthma, decreased lung function, cardiovascular disease, and low birth weight. A study by the World Bank showed that the factories were the valley’s leading source of small particulates, which can penetrate deep into the respiratory system and pass into the blood stream. Levels in the Kathmandu Valley have reached 15 times the World Health Organization’s recommended concentration.

A worker transports bricks at Sipadol. (photo by Stephen Bailey)

Men and women labor 18 hours a day, in an atmosphere loaded with brick dust and smoky particulate. At Sri Navadurga Mata kiln, in the village of Sipadol, I saw people carry loads of up to 30 bricks on their backs, supporting cloths strung across their foreheads. Most laborers are Magars, an ethnic group from the foothills of the Himalayas in west central Nepal. Traditionally renowned as farmers and soldiers, they have been driven to the valley in search of the work that is increasingly centered in the metropolis. Families live in one room brick shacks just a few yards uphill from the chimneys, each dwelling about 50 square feet.

I spoke to a Newari man who said he woke up at 1 AM each day to begin mixing clay with water by hand and foot, then molding bricks with the help of his wife and older children, for 700 rupees, or about eight dollars, a day. His work did not finish until around 6:30 PM.“It’s not just that we get breathing problems,” he told me. “Every day we live with the pain, in our joints, in our muscles.”

Dr. Ram K. Chandyo, a researcher from the Institute of Medicine in Kathmandu, has been carrying out children’s health studies from Siddhi Memorial Hospital in Bhaktapur for 15 years. He told me that conditions at Sipadol are some of the better ones around. But even under the best conditions, the poverty, malnutrition, cramped conditions, and pollution lead to sickly children who stand out in the research data. It’s the children, he told me, who are suffering the most. “The conditions are extremely bad for their growth and development,” he said. “We are seeing serious effects to development and IQ.” Surveys by the Child Development Society found at least 30 children work at each factory.

Siddhi Memorial Hospital’s nursing supervisor, Sushila Khanal told me, “Sometimes their hair is white and you can see abdominal distension. They are extremely vulnerable to pneumonia.”

A nurse treats a burned child at Siddhi hospital. (photo by Stephen Bailey)

Families come to Siddhi Memorial from across the valley, seeking free children’s health care. When I visited, the hazards the kilns pose to children were made alarmingly plain on the bodies of patient after patient. Kul Bdr Pun, aged 2, came into the emergency unit screaming and writhing with pain. He had stepped into a pot of boiling water in the cramped one room home where his family lives, at the Sakaswoti brick factory. The nurses peeled away the dead flesh and bandaged the bright pink skin, while his mother held him still and clasped a hand over his mouth. His father Bal Bahadur Pun frowned when I asked him what could be done. “We are all living in a small room so there’s is big chance of the same accident.”

Later, five year old Dina came in after having nearly drowned. The third of three daughters, she was brought into the emergency unit with a low blood oxygen level and hypothermia. Her family live and work at a brick factory in nearby Tathali. The ponds and streams used by the factories have become a lethal trap for children like her. One nurse told me they received two or three similar cases a month, many fatal.

At the same time, a three year old was brought in with a burned and bleeding mouth. She had bitten into a damaged electricity cable in the factory grounds. There was no cease to the flow and variety of young patients and their preventable injuries.

The Bhaktapur District Administration Office is working at declaring Bhaktapur a child labour-free zone. Government schools run seasonal classes for the children. But as long as the going rate is a meager 600 or 700 rupees for 1,000 bricks a day, the temptation for families to have all hands on deck is difficult to resist.

It is impossible to say for sure whether the premature baby’s death was the result of the current living conditions. What is certain is that these conditions are seriously compromising the lives of all the children living in proximity to the kilns. Eighty-five percent of outpatients at Siddhi Memorial Hospital have respiratory problems, and that is to say nothing of the other injuries and conditions they suffer. “The damage that is being done now,” says Dr. Ram, “will stay with the children for their entire lives.”

This article originally appeared on The Huffington Post.

Every year, millions of rural farmers, fishermen, and forest dwellers pack up their belongings and relocate from villages to cities. A century ago, just 10 percent of the world’s population lived in urban areas; today, more than half does. And while plenty of these migrants move eagerly, many are dislodged by deforestation, overfishing, climate change, and other forms of environmental destruction.

A River Changes Course, a documentary shown this week at the Environmental Film Festival at Yale (EFFY), puts a human face to these global changes. River follows three Cambodian families — one living in a floating hut on the Tonlé Sap River, one dwelling deep in the jungle, and one whose eldest daughter moves to Phnom Penh to work in a garment factory — as their world is transformed by forces far beyond than their power to control, or even understand. Although demolished trees provide the film its unsettling backdrop, its real focus is the three families, and the meditative rhythm of their lives: hands rooting for potatoes, scythes mowing through swathes of cane, fish cleavers thumping against chopping blocks. Over the film’s course, however, these rhythms slowly break, disrupted by the migration of children whose homes no longer hold opportunity.

River, which recently won the Grand Jury Prize for world cinema documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, is the creation of filmmaker Kalyanee Mam. Mam, 36, was born in Cambodia during the reign of the Khmer Rouge; in 1979, her family fled to a refugee camp on the Thai border before making their way to California. Although her background is in law, Mam is today a filmmaker with an impressive and growing oeuvre, which includes the 2010 film Inside Job, a documentary about the banking hijinks that produced the global financial crisis.

Sage caught up with Mam on the fourth day of the festival to talk about apolitical activism, the responsibilities of filmmakers, and the similarities between rural Cambodians and folks on Main Street, USA.

Sage: I was struck by how little political or historical context the film provided. Instead of explaining why the environmental destruction is happening, or who’s inflicting it, you present it through your subjects’ eyes, without narration. Can you talk about that decision?

KM: My approach to documentary filmmaking has been to tell the human story rather than to tell a political one. I consider myself an advocate for social issues, but I’m not a political person — I don’t take sides on issues. To me, filmmaking isn’t about finding solutions — it’s about asking the right questions, and trying to better understand situations. For me, the best way to do that is to explore the lives of people, and allow them to tell their own stories. The experts for me are the people themselves, rather than the scientists or the companies or the government.

Filmmaker Kalyanee Mam.

Sage: That lack of context also gives the film a universal quality — yes, it’s clearly about Cambodia, but the urban migration you depict is happening in thousands of communities, all over the world.

KM: Absolutely. People everywhere are trying to navigate the world and find balance in their lives in the face of destruction and globalization and development. My purpose has always been to understand the stories of people whose stories might not otherwise be told. For me, that’s more important than showing the bigger picture. But I think that when you tell human stories, the bigger picture and the politics reveal themselves too. At the end of the film, when Sav Samour talks about the companies coming in and taking their lands away, that’s a political statement. She’s talking about devastation, the forests being cut down, the tigers, the bears, and the elephants that no longer roam the jungles. To me, that’s pretty political.

Sage: The film makes it clear that everyone in Cambodia is touched by global capitalism. But for those Cambodians who are so remote that they hadn’t even seen a camera before they met you, how do they understand the significance of, say, a multinational timber company? What does global capitalism mean to someone who’s not deeply embedded in it?

KM: Many people in Cambodia don’t have access to paper or films, and they don’t understand the bigger picture of what’s happening to their country. The purpose of the film is to bring all these different situations — what’s happening in the forest, what’s happening on the lake, what’s happening in the factories — into one large picture, and to share that picture with Cambodia and the world.

When people in Cambodia view this film, it’s often their first opportunity to travel to different parts of the country. The people who live on the lake have never seen the people in the jungle before. The people in the jungle have never seen people working in a factory before. So this is really their first opportunity to see their country — how beautiful it is, how precious it is, and how important it is to preserve and protect that beauty.

Sage: What was the reaction of the people in the film when they finally saw themselves on screen?

KM: We had a screening in Cambodia for the premiere of the film. There were 600 people at the screening, and 200 of them were parents of garment factory workers. For many of those parents, it was the first time they’d ever seen inside the factories where their daughters work.

A young woman in the audience stood up, and she was Cham Muslim, like the boy Sari in the film. There are 200,000 Cham Muslims in Cambodia — they’re both an ethnic and a religious minority. The fact that she stood up to speak to an audience of 600 people, as a woman, was already astounding. But it was even more remarkable that she was Cham Muslim and speaking out. She said that growing up, she had always felt ostracized — she’d never felt like she belonged in Cambodia. And she said that now, for the first time in her life, she felt like she was part of a community. She felt like a Cambodian. And that’s incredible, that people in Cambodia are feeling inspired in this way. This film is about them, it’s about their country, and it’s about their identity as Cambodians.

Many films made about Cambodia have been about the Khmer Rouge period — for most people, that’s all they know about Cambodia. But this film talks about the beauty of Cambodia, not just the destruction. Which just reinforces how terrible the destruction is.

Sage: That’s why it’s so interesting to hear you talk about deliberately making an apolitical film — because Cambodia is a country with such a fraught and well-documented political history.

KM: Our lives are not political. In the film, Khieu [who works in a garment factory], says this: “I wake up every morning and go to work, I sleep, I eat, I come home from work, and then I wake up and do it all over again.” When I hear that, I think: we can all relate to that.

The struggle that she’s going through is the struggle that we’re all going through here in the United States. In the film, they talk about rising food prices, they talk about the difficulty of working in a factory, about being in debt. Here in the U.S., people are struggling against the rising cost of living, they’re struggling against the rising cost of health care, the rising cost of education, all the basic necessities for a life of dignity. We’re going through the same things that Sari and Khieu and Sav Samour are going through in their lives, too.

Sage: A River Changes Course is an appropriate sequel to Inside Job in that it depicts crimes of capitalism, albeit in a very different setting than Wall Street. Can you talk about some of the parallels you see between the two films?

KM: I think there are parallels in all of the films I’ve made. My first film [Between Earth & Sky] was about Iraqi refugees fleeing their country. They were victims of capitalism too, in a way. Inside Job was about the consequences of the financial crisis, which came about because of a screw-up in the capitalist system.

But I’m not an anti-capitalist advocate. What I want to ultimately express is that whatever we do, whatever policies we implement, we always need to consider the consequences of our policies. In this film, the government and corporations are trying to exploit opportunities to build factories, to cut down forests, to fish in the lakes and rivers, and even to export sand from Cambodia to Singapore. They’re chipping away at Cambodia, with grave environmental consequences to the country. But they don’t care about those consequences, because they just want to exploit the opportunity.

Sage: A lot of environmental documentaries end with straightforward, actionable takeaways for the audience — just eat grass-fed beef from now on, or put a solar panel on your roof, and everything will be okay. But this is a movie that indicts an entire global system, one that we’re all part of and may not be able to escape. Having seen the movie, what can the audience do to not be complicit in the destruction it depicts?

KM: As a filmmaker, I feel like my role is to make people aware of what’s happening, but I think that the responsibility of action falls on organizations. I intend to connect people to organizations that are working on the ground, fighting land-grabbing and deforestation in Cambodia. We’re already partnered with the Documentation Center of Cambodia, but there are so many other organizations across Cambodia who are fighting these things.

If you watched the film and were inspired enough to go to Cambodia, that would be amazing. But if you watched the film and you’re inspired to think of yourself and your life and the people around you in a different way, that’s amazing too. One of the things I found most touching about the film were the relationships, and how loving and supporting they are toward each other. In the United States, you’d never find a 14-year-old boy talking about how he wants to work and support his family. You’d never find a little girl chopping fish heads and supporting her family with those wages. And I’m not saying that child labor is good, obviously. But at the same time, the idea of love, the idea of community, the idea of family, is just so intimate. I think we have a lot to learn from other societies about compassion and selflessness.

Sage: Were you ever tempted to intervene in people’s lives more than you did? When Khieu’s mother is 22 cents short on her debt, for example, didn’t you feel the desire to help?

KM: One of the most difficult moments for me came at the end, when Sari told me he didn’t want to study. When I met him, he was 14 years old, and I thought, “I’m gonna film him, and at the end he’s gonna go to school, he’s gonna have an education, he’s gonna do exactly what he wants to do — or what I want him to do.” But no: It didn’t work out that way. I gave him the opportunity to go to school, but he didn’t want to. Right now he’s learning Korean, and he’s going to go work in a factory in South Korea. At first, I felt deep disappointment. But then I realized that I can’t be disappointed, because this is not my life. This is his life, and it’s his responsibility to do what he thinks is right for himself.

People say the forests are quiet. The forests are not quiet.” In fact, the forests of southeast Alaska ring with the voices of native Alaskans, with the hum of chainsaws, and, the film Musicwood tells us, with the notes of guitars.

At the heart of the film is the story of the guitar makers at Taylor, Martin, and Gibson learning where their wood comes from, following it to its source, and engaging with the corporation that is behind the unsustainable clearcutting of Sitka spruce.  This is a journey designed by Greenpeace to use this high profile industry to “organize the market as a catalyst for change.”  And it’s a powerful experience for these guitar makers. “I had never seen clearcutting before,” one admits.

Viewers, too, see the harvesting operations from the ground and from the air: striking footage of miles of clearcuts, stumps, and bare ground. Humanity needs these reminders. Anything paper or wooden, even a beautiful guitar, comes from a tree, a forest, a landscape. In communicating this fundamental, oft-forgotten fact, the film excels.

The complicated part of the story, though — and the plotline that the film has a harder time conveying — is that the corporation doing the clearcutting is Sealaska, an Alaska native corporation.  While located in the Tongass National Forest, the land from which these 500 to 600 year old spruce are harvested is native land, home of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian peoples. “We revere the land, but we also utilize the land,” says Sealaska’s vice chair, making the case that the timber industry provides an economy to these tribes.

Yet it seems that the link between resource extraction and local economic vitality is not so direct. “I have never seen any money go for this economy,” says one native woman interviewed in the film. To her, the forests that the people depend on are being cut without thought, to the last tree. “And then what?” she wonders.

This, to your very biased reviewer, who researches logging on native lands on the other side of Canada, is the real issue in the rainforests of Alaska.  From the claims that the money from logging has led to advancement of native issues, to the seemingly made-up tree felling ceremony that Sealaska stages for the visiting guitar makers, to the differences in opinion about whether logging will be just “a short, bad memory in our history” or a lasting economic force, to the links between current rates of poverty and past forced assimilation under U.S. government policy — it is clear that there is a lot more to the local tensions surrounding logging on native lands than is dealt with in Musicwood.

This is not to insinuate that Musicwood isn’t thought-provoking, or that it does not deal with important issues. The narrative of the film is engaging, and the entire premise — the triangular collaboration between environmentalists, music companies, and timber corporations — is fascinating.

Still, that frame feels narrower than the bigger issues at hand. Film time that could be spent in the spruce forests and native communities of Alaska is instead spent with the guitar makers and players. Ecological and cultural complexities are simplified.  While Musicwood does make for a great story, and, I hope, vibrant discussion in the halls of FES, the guitar theme can carry the film just so far. As legendary singer-songwriter Steve Earl puts it at the end, “They’re only guitars.”

Dust off your moleskines and de-cobweb your typewriters: Sage Magazine’s annual writing contest is back!

Sage is looking for works of journalism and literary nonfiction that address nature, the environment, and sustainability. We strive to publish work that blurs the boundaries between human and natural systems, that links environmental issues with social justice and wellbeing.  The only qualification for entry, however, is that your piece has not been previously published.

Big bucks — not to mention eternal glory — could soon be yours: First prize is $500, second is $300, and third is $200! All finalists will be published online and possibly in print, and will be read by our ballin’ panel of celebrity judges, including Bill McKibben (founder of 350.org), Florence Williams (author of Breasts), Carl Zimmer (science writer at the New York Times and elsewhere), and Jon Mooallem (contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine).

The deadline for submissions is April 19. Please email your work to sagemagazine@gmail.com. Good luck, and give us your best!

The floods that swept Thailand in 2011 may have been the most dramatic demonstration of how changing rainfall affects human lives, but they’re far from the only example. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Navy.

Decades from now, historians may look back on 2012 as the year that the climate change chickens came home to roost. Each season brought a fresh meteorological anomaly: a weirdly warm winter was followed by a brutally hot, dry summer, which gave way to an autumn marked by one of the most destructive storms in American history, made worse by years of sea level rise. But while climate-fueled disasters like superstorms and crop failures are a relatively recent development in the United States, such fiascos already threaten life and property on a daily basis in less well-off nations. Bangladesh, for example, faces an escalating barrage of cyclones, sea level rise, and drought that annually kills thousands and cripples the country’s prospects for growth. As developing countries experience increasingly severe climate impacts, their citizens may abandon their homes, both by choice and by necessity, to escape rising oceans, extreme weather, and droughts and floods.

Few researchers have spent as much time pondering the future of climate-driven human movement as Koko Warner, a social scientist at United Nations University. In late November, Dr. Warner and her team released their latest research, a report called “Where the Rain Falls” that draws upon interviews with hundreds of families across eight countries to detail how shifting rainfall patterns may be driving migration in the developing world. As precipitation becomes less predictable, the report implies, society’s poorest and most vulnerable members will face a disproportionate share of the risk. Sage Magazine recently caught up with Warner to discuss changing rainfall patterns, the future of human movement, and why every migrant wants to settle near the church.

Sage Magazine: I think many people are under the impression — I certainly was before I read your work — that by this point in human history, the age of human nomadism is over. But Where the Rain Falls reveal that migrations are happening all over the world, all the time, in response to environmental impacts.

Koko Warner: Right. We looked at a climatic stressor — changes in rainfall variability — in eight different countries: Guatemala, Peru, India, Bangladesh, Ghana, Tanzania, Vietnam, and Thailand. We wanted to find out what changes in rainfall patterns mean for food security and household economies, and how migration behavior changes, or doesn’t change, when households face rainfall stressors. We were primarily talking to small-holder farmers growing food for consumption and for their household economy. And in all of the countries, to one degree or another, we found that the most vulnerable households make migration decisions based on perceived rainfall variability and food security.

Photo courtesy of United Nations University.

Sage: So just to be clear, you correlated migration patterns with people’s perceptions of rainfall rather than measured rainfall.

Warner: Exactly. We did household surveys and conducted group discussions and interviews with community members to gauge their perceptions. We then worked with the national and local meteorology offices to see if these perceptions of variability matched up with meteorology data, and in almost all cases they did.

Sage: “Changes in rainfall variability” could mean lots of different things. Do you find that floods or droughts are more powerful drivers of migration?

Warner: I’d say equally. Households consistently told us they’re experiencing changes not only in the timing of rainfall — it’s too early, it’s too late, there’s too much, there’s too little — but also in the quality of rainfall. The quality of rainfall is the hardest to measure with meteorology data: gauges often just give you a 24-hour reading, so it’s hard to know how many centimeters you got in a given hour. But people were telling us the intensity of rainfall was indeed changing, which has major implications for erosion and whether or not seeds get washed away.

Sage: In the report, you describe how some households were more resilient to rainfall variability and migration than others. What types of households fared the best?

Warner: The resilient households often send younger people — 20-somethings who have better education than their parents, who migrate at any old time rather than being as dependent on climate or seasons, and who also send back remittances to their families. We found that migration pattern most strongly in Thailand, where a lot of rural households have members who are actually migrating internationally.

By contrast, people from vulnerable households are not migrating very far, rarely across national borders. They just don’t have the means to get that far. Their migration patterns were often from one rural area to another, and depended largely on their own skill-sets. If they have mostly agricultural skills, they’ll have a hard time diversifying their livelihoods, and in the hungry season they’ll have to move to other agricultural areas in search of jobs.

Sage: I’m sure it varies a lot from case to case, but when vulnerable people are forced to migrate between rural areas, how far are they going? Are they just heading over to the village next door, or are they forced to move hundreds of miles?

Warner: The distances that people migrate have a lot to do with their options. Are they close to a highway? Do they have enough money for bus fare? In Ghana, people’s ability to pay bus fare affected how far they got. In Tanzania, we sampled in the area of Mount Kilimanjaro, and we saw a lot of elevation differentiation in mobility patterns — it almost seemed like those communities were commuting between elevations, moving relatively short distances over shorter periods of time, although the link with rainfall variability was still there. In Bangladesh, people were moving to different sub-regions of the country in search of areas with less soil degradation and better agricultural conditions.

Sage: What do migrants do when they arrive at the end of their journeys? Do they stay with relatives? Do they set up camps? How do they adjust to their new homes?

Warner: That’s a great question, but unfortunately I don’t know the answer. This phase of our research was focused on areas of origin — where these people are coming from. And our research shows that migration isn’t just about the people leaving; it’s about the people who stay behind. If the migrants who go out looking for sacks of food or money to send back to their families are successful, it makes all the difference in the world for the people left behind.

Migration also has differentiated impacts. In Ghana, Tanzania, and Bangladesh, we typically saw women taking on double and triple burdens: having to do the agricultural work, keep up the household economy, and care for children and elderly parents. We’re looking at migration as a system, not just at the people who leave.

Sage: How can you tell when a household is vulnerable versus when it’s resilient?

Warner: The resilient households were telling us that they were not only engaging in agriculture, but had three or four different livelihood options. Resilient households also had better access to social support groups, along with formal and informal institutions of social resilience.

Sage: I like that phrase — “institutions of social resilience.” What’s an example of such an institution?

Warner: A friend of mine, Robin Bronen, is working on community relocation in Kivalina, Alaska [currently undergoing a planned relocation to escape sea level rise]. When you relocate, you change the spatial distribution of the town, and in Kivalina everybody wants to live close to the bar, the church, and the school. Because that’s where social interaction happens — that’s where the power is.

That’s also where we see resilient households in our rainfalls research — closest to the bar, the school, and the church. Households who had less access to those institutions were less socially included and often were not favored politically. While politics weren’t part of our research, they do hold implications for how we conduct climate adaptation and how we channel support for people.

Sage: One of the things that makes Kivalina so interesting is that, while they’re already losing some land, their relocation is also proactive — they see that their village is in deep trouble long-term. By comparison, it seems that the migrations you’re describing are reactive: the rain falls, or the drought comes, and the people move after the fact. Did you see any communities that anticipated climatic stressors and migrated before they struck? 

Warner: Not yet. People want to remain where they are, and they’re doing as much as they can to stay. But the farther they get down the road of vulnerability, the more erosive their coping strategies become.

Sage: What do you mean by erosive coping strategies? Are you referring to literal erosion, like people planting on more marginal land?

Warner: We see all kinds of impacts. The stories of older people are wonderful resources for social science — their memories and observations are just gems. We heard older people in the Sahel belt saying that, before the great drought of the late 1970’s and early 80’s, they had forests, and depended on hunting and forestry for their livelihoods. But when the droughts came, they had to cut down all the trees to sell the wood and survive, and now they can barely make ends meet.

That’s when you see the erosive coping strategies: when surviving becomes more important than thriving. You start seeing tradeoffs, people — especially women — saying, ‘Okay, I’ll eat less in order to stay here, or I’ll make sure that the children have enough, or I’ll eat less and make sure that my husband has enough out in the fields. We’ll start skimping on school tuition and just send our kids sporadically to school.’ And it just goes down this road.

Sage: You mentioned earlier that most of the migrations that you witnessed were within a home nation. But as the impacts get bigger and certain places grow less habitable, as you say, can you imagine societies moving en masse from country to country?

Warner: The big question in the room, the holy grail of this research, is to understand what’s going to happen in the future. If our climate changes as significantly as it could, the issue will be population redistribution, not just migration. Seventy percent of the world’s megacities are within two kilometers of the coast, and they’re often in low-elevation areas. And in the resilient households in our rainfalls research, a lot of young people moved to cities, where they have greater livelihood diversification options.

So you could start seeing greater concentrations of people living in social nodes that may offer good opportunities short-term, but are physically located in vulnerable locations, where they’re exposed to other climatic stressors like sea level rise or cyclones.

Sage: If you were a policymaker rather than a researcher, how would you apply the findings of your report? Would you use it to help vulnerable communities migrate in a way that’s less disruptive to them? 

Warner: Here’s the ironic thing: our research has told us a lot more about efforts to build livelihood resilience than about migration policy. People will migrate, and while I know there’s a big debate about national borders, it’s very hard to stop people from moving. We want to make sure that people are moving under desirable circumstances, where they have options and are informed of them. We also shouldn’t underestimate the powerful force for good that migrants are in the communities they go to.

Sage: Really? Migrants are a force for good? You hear so much about how climate refugees are going to create conflict. 

Warner: The diaspora has a lot of knowledge, and that’s an area of unexplored potential. Migrants are capable of bringing in education, encouraging integration, building community, introducing new skill-sets. And yes, there can also be conflict and tension; we’ve found that in our research as well. But there’s as much potential for enhanced cooperation as there is for tension.

Sage: How do you think the migration conversation is going to play out long-term? Are you confident that societies will figure out a way to successfully navigate large-scale movements?

We have a colleague named Bob Ford, a GIS specialist at the University of Rwanda, and he’d reviewed one of our previous reports, “In Search of Shelter.” As we were talking to him during the review, he said something I’ll never forget. Here in Africa, he said, relatively small, marginal shifts in climate send masses of people from rural areas to the cities, just in search of a place to survive. He said the fact that we see this much ferment now, before climate change has really unfurled itself, indicates that we have to get prepared.

And that has stuck with me as a motivation. I’m not a historian, but we forget that after the height of the Roman Empire there was a Dark Age that lasted for hundreds of years. Human society can regress.

Photo by Alaskan Dude.

The grizzly bears of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem face any number of alarming threats: the beetle plague that has wiped out whitebark pine; the lake trout invasion that has devastated cutthroat trout; the possibility that grizzlies will soon lose their endangered species protection and be subjected to hunting. And that’s not to say nothing of usual hazards, like the highways that interrupt habitat and the conflicts with farmers that usually turn out far worse for the bear than for the human.

Bears do have one thing going for them, though: Louisa Willcox, one of the staunchest bear defenders in the Lower 48. While Willcox has put her skills to use on Western environmental challenges like mining and clear-cutting, grizzly conservation is the issue that gets her out of bed in the morning. She’s fought for bears for the better part of three decades — first with the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, then with the Sierra Club, and now as Senior Wildlife Advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Sage Magazine recently sat down with Willcox to talk about grizzly conservation, cooperation with farmers and ranchers, and how to block a billion-dollar gold mine.

Sage Magazine: What got you interested in land and wildlife conservation, specificaly in grizzlies?

Louisa Willcox: I fell in love with the mountains of the west in my teens and became a mountaineering instructor, which exposed me to some incredible wilderness outside Yellowstone Park and throughout the west. My love for the wild and wildlife led me inexorably to conservation. When I found out that some of my favorite places were threatened by the oil and gas industry, I had to jump in and try to do something about it — it seemed like the right thing to do.

One thing led to another, and I said, you know, this is really interesting work, and I really like these challenges, and the west is full of major threats to wild places and wildlife. And that’s been keeping me busy for thirty years.

Sage: Where’d you do your mountaineering?

In the Rocky Mountains, in Wyoming, in the Pac Northwest, in the Cascades, in the southwest. Got to go up to Alaska a couple times. Baja.

There are certain landscapes that, when I feel under duress or in distress, I think of them. A particular lake, or being below some great peaks, gives me a great sense of renewal and calm. The wild has been very important — it’s been a transformative force in my life.

Sage: You work on grizzly bears. What makes them so special to you?

Well, I had a few experiences with bears in the wild that were very benign, but got me really curious. They were on mountaineering courses, and I got pretty close to several bears. They didn’t really know we were there, and they looked up and were startled and ran away.

When you are in bear country, you know you’re in a special place. Everything sounds a little bit different. Every crackling of a twig raises the hair on the back of your neck. You have to be completely aware and completely in the moment. You can’t be daydreaming or on your iPod in grizzly bear country — you have to be paying attention to what’s there. And that opens your eyes to all kinds of wonders, to plants and rocks and glaciers and all.

Bears started out to me being a very personal experience, and then the more I learned about grizzly bears, the more I realized how in trouble they were. We’ve eliminated them from 99% of the lands where they used to live. They’re threatened by human development of all kinds — oil and gas, timber, encroachment from subdivisions — as well as excessive killing. We continue to do a lot of killing, unnecessarily in many cases.

A lot of the work that I do is aimed at the root causes of these problems: trying to deal with excessive killing, trying to figure out how we can make peace with bears among ranchers and communities that are inadvertently drawing bears to garbage. How we can actually deal with habitat threats by protecting more lands, by reducing cattle conflicts in some cases, swapping out allotments in areas where grizzly bears are not, so bears have some secure habitat.

And that takes a lot of work — it means you can’t parachute in and say, I’m gonna be a crusader for bears and do anything meaningful. It means you’ve spent a lot of time studying the problem and coming up with your own appraisal of what’s happening, and then developing your alternatives. And that’s a creative process. I think conservation at bottom is a creative act: it’s about creating new possibilities out of what looks like an impasse, or a disaster. And there’s always new possibilities — you could be very, very stuck, but there’s always something you can do. Even if it’s very small, you can change the momentum in a different direction, or change the conversation. And that’s what I’ve learned — sometimes baby steps, when you’re at an impasse, can be built on over time to create lasting change.

I’m working right now with a number of ranchers on conflicts with grizzly bears. They were people who weren’t really sure what to think about me. But after a year and a half, they’re basically saying, well, Louisa’s not a liar, and she’s really okay. You hang in there with people, and you show up, and you’re authentic and you’re honest, and you say what you believe. You’re not acting from an ideological viewpoint, you’re acting from a practical standpoint, from what can be done here. And you’re taking risks, because you’re putting yourself out there. And that can be very scary. The process of conservation work can change you. And you have to be ready, because if you take chances, and you make relationships, and you move the ball — or you don’t move the ball — some part of you has changed.

Sage: What was the most exciting or hard-fought victory you’ve had during the course of your career?

There are several, but one big one was success at the end of a ten-year campaign that stopped a gold mine from being built right next to Yellowstone Park. There’s still a billion dollars worth of gold in the ground, and will be forever, because the lands were withdrawn from mineral development. It started out as a grassroots campaign in a community that had fifty people in it, a tiny little town called Cooke City, and we ended up talking to the White House — I met President Clinton a few times, and he took this on as a campaign pledge for his second term, where he said there are some places too precious to mine, there are some places where gold is not the most important thing. And this place near Yellowstone was one of them.

That was really an incredible victory because we were starting from nowhere. Nobody had ever told this Canadian mining company that had mining holdings throughout the world — nobody had ever told them no. And we said no, you’re not gonna do this. At first, our colleagues laughed at us — our colleagues in the conservation community said you might as well settle, figure out how you can mitigate the impacts, and we said, no, we can’t — this is a mine we cannot live with.

We did everything that we could: we lobbied Washington, we organized grassroots: the snowmobilers, the hunters and fishermen, the ranchers, everyone who lived next to the mine or downstream from it. We got academics involved in looking at the impacts, we got the United Nations involved looking at the impacts — Yellowstone’s a World Heritage Site. And they said indeed, this is a park in danger. And that upped the ante in terms of international recognition. We finally made the landscape safe enough for the Parks Service and the Environmental Protection Agency to come out against the mine, and to throw a lot of resources into biologists and hydrologists and geologists to look at the impacts, and they felt very confident that this mine shouldn’t happen, and so they became really effective proponents. Finally we got the White House involved. It was a rag-tag, funky army, and we were told we never could win, and we did.

Sage: Were you representing NRDC at the time?

I was representing a group called the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, where I worked for ten years. It was a complete David and Goliath story.

Sage: On the other hand, what was the most challenging campaign you’ve come up against?

I think it has to do with state wildlife agencies, and the sportsmen who they see as their clients. The state game agencies are supposed to manage wildlife for the public trust, for all the public. But in fact they serve a narrow set of interests, particularly the agricultural community and hunters. And if you’re not in one of those camps, they don’t really care what you think. And instead of broadening their scope to include other members of the public, and other wildlife species you can’t kill, over the last twenty years they’ve gone the other way, and they’re serving a more and more narrow set of interests. Which is really disturbing, because as the public keeps clamoring for more and more opportunities to photograph wildlife, and expressing different kinds of values and protecting wildlife, the states have really hunkered down, especially on killing predators.

It’s a very disturbing trend at the state level, coupled with what’s happening in the sportsmen community, which is being increasingly overtaken by the National Rifle Association and their ilk. They’re dumping huge money into creating these extreme anti-predator groups that are just clamoring to kill more coyotes, wolves, mountain lions, grizzly bears. And that’s a very disturbing trend, and a significant challenge to our work.

Sage: What do you find most exciting and most frustrating about working on grizzly bear conservation?

What’s exciting is that people are excited. When you go to Yellowstone Park, and you get in the middle of a bear jam, and you close your car door and walk up and listen to the chatter, and people clicking their cameras, and saying, “Yo! The mom’s nursing her cub!” It’s incredibly invigorating to see people in a state of wonder, that there’s still such animals that exist, and they can see them up close and personal. That is very exciting, that there’s always new generations of people experiencing Yellowstone Park and Glacier for the first time and finding that personal soulful meaning through a connection with a place, and with animals. That is always, at core, what keeps me going, and what I find lasting and meaningful.

The most challenging parts have to do with old stories that are no longer very useful. “Bears as a threat to progress, a threat to civilization as we know it.” “Bears as monsters to God.” “The only good bear is a dead bear.” “Bears as symbols of everything we thought we were putting behind us when we settled the west.” These old narratives are very challenging, they’re very deep-seated — even more deep-seated than most people realize.

The other thing that I think is a really significant challenge and problem is that grizzly bears demand that agencies across large geographies work together. Because grizzly bears’ home ranges straddle national park lands, forest lands, state lands, private lands — enormous chunks of geography. And yet the agencies that work on these issues are very territorial, turf-minded, and narrow. They don’t play well together. They’re worried about their own budgets, and advancing their own careers, and they’re in their own cultural context, and they’re not very nice.

Yellowstone Park is probably the best example. They see their authority ending at the park boundary. They don’t appreciate that they could have a lot of influence if they showed up routinely in the town of Cody, Wyoming, outside the park, and said, you know, here’s what we’re doing to try to resolve our conflicts. But these agencies are perpetually us versus them — your forest, your park, your state, your county — rather than bringing people together. I’ve rarely seen any kind of useful coalition being formed by the agencies. It always seems to happen outside the government, because the government is too busy on their own control agendas, or disinterested in these broad-based coalitions, which I think are ultimately where the action is, and where advances can be made.

Sage: Have you had successes where you’ve been able to work with different government agencies together?

Yeah, there have been, on a couple of different issues. Grizzly bears can’t resist domestic sheep. So domestic sheep in grizzly bear habitat is a big problem. In the 1980’s, with the Forest Service working with the Bureau of Land Management and the ranchers, as well as private landowners, they were able to figure out a program to swap sheep allotments outside core grizzly bear habitats and move them to places where there were no grizzly bears, and so less conflict. And so the core grizzly bear habitat area is sheep-free now. And the ranchers did it on a willing, permittee basis. The ranchers were not getting kicked off the land, they were being offered a place to go. Some of them went out of business, although they were doing that anyway.

That worked because of the listing of the grizzly bear under the Endangered Species Act, so there was a sense of urgency, and also urgency was created by the fact that huge numbers of bears were dying in sheep conflicts, and you could see these black holes for bears on the landscape in these sheep allotments. The agencies did come together and work that through.

Sage: One last question. In general, what strategies do you find to be the most effective?

Well, thoughtful ones, for starters. Strategies that first rely on a clear and comprehensive definition of the problem. Too often people seize on strategies before really having a comprehensive understanding of the problem. Strategies can never be developed in the absence of a lot of background homework. That having been said, I think the strategy really depends on what the nature of the problem is. Coalitions can be useful for some things, but not particularly useful for others, when people aren’t willing to have a meaningful conversation. There are some really intractable issues related to off-road vehicle use, for example, where the off-road vehicle community has got a “take it all” philosophy, and there’s no real opportunity to have a conversation. So our emphasis has been instead on federal land management agencies that realize they have a growing problem with uncontrolled offroad ATV use. In that case, dealing with the off-road vehicle community, which we’ve tried to do, has proved ineffective. We’re going to land management agencies and saying, what can we do with you guys instead?

The strategy also has to be revised. I think too often in the environmental community you see people using one campaign and one strategy, and keep applying it forever. I’ve seen organizations essentially drive themselves into the ground by essentially replicating the same cookie cutter strategy over and over again instead of revising it. An effective strategy is a live item, it’s a creative process, and it’s gotta be in tune with the feedback you’re getting from the outside world. Are you getting positive enough feedback with ranchers to continue that conversation? Are you getting positive feedback from the state legislatures that might help you move a conflict resolution program forward? Are you getting negative feedback and you have to do damage control with the state legislature? I think it’s impossible to isolate strategy from the overall campaign and the overall context. People develop their strategic plans and then they get wedded to them, and that can be a disaster.