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How Model Quannah ChasingHorse Is Fighting for Her Community and the Planet

jversteegh — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 13:30:58 +0000

When Indigenous activist and model Quannah ChasingHorse was three, her family moved to a small village in Mongolia, where her mother, Jody Potts-Joseph, had taken a job teaching English. During supply trips to a nearby town, Jody would often find Quannah in front of their hotel’s small television, transfixed, watching a channel that showed nothing but high-fashion runway shows.

“My memories start in Mongolia,” Quannah, now 21, says of those years. “There’s a picture of me sitting, with my legs crisscross, just staring at the TV in awe. Ever since then, my dream was to be a model.”

That dream is now a reality. Quannah—whose mother is Han Gwich’in and is from Eagle Village, Alaska, and whose father is Oglala and Sicangu Lakota (tribes based in South Dakota)—has gone from being a teenage climate activist to walking in runway shows for brands like Chanel, Chloé, and Gucci, providing an Indigenous presence at fashion’s top levels and helping boost visibility for Native brands and designers. Her ascent is chronicled in a new documentary short, , supported by the North Face. (The company premiered Walking Two Worlds on its YouTube channel 0n September 12.)

In advance of the film’s release, I spoke with Quannah and Jody remotely. They were sitting at the kitchen table at Jody’s cabin in Eagle Village, where their Han Gwich’in ancestors have lived for thousands of years, just west of the border with Canada, on the upper Yukon River. I could hear barking dogs outside the cabin—Jody’s sled-dog team.

As the women explained, modeling may have been Quannah’s destiny, but it was advocacy work that first put her in the public eye: as a teenager, she protested against drilling in the (ANWR), served on the , spoke at climate rallies, and worked with the Alaska Wilderness League. Quannah’s mother and grandmother are also activists, and Quannah came to her role as a land and water protector through their influence and from close observation of her surroundings while growing up.

“In my life I have seen these changes, I have experienced these changes, I have witnessed these changes,” she tells me. For Indigenous activists, climate is more than personal—it’s existential. “Our way of life is at risk,” she says. “Our culture, all of those things that make us who we are, that make our identity.”

Quannah ChasingHorse (left) and her mother, Jody Potts-Joseph, at No More Stolen Sisters, a day of awareness for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (Photo: Keri Oberly)

In 2020, Quannah was doing get-out-the-vote organizing when she was noticed by a Calvin Klein casting agent and hired for the CK One campaign , which featured young people from across the U.S. Quannah, who has traditional tattoos on her chin and temples—hand-poked by Jody during a coming-of-age ceremony—was one of its breakout stars. She soon signed with the modeling agency IMG.

In a fortunate twist, a documentary filmmaker was along for much of the ride. , a PhD candidate in political ecology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, first met Quannah and her mom in 2019, at a summit in Washington, D.C., organized to fight drilling in the ANWR. “Quannah was incredible in meetings on Capitol Hill,” she recalls, “and in her conviction that they needed to hear and understand what she was saying. I think she was born for this.”

Wikler pitched the North Face on the possibility of a film project—inspired by the brand’s long-standing support for advocacy efforts around the ANWR and other causes—and began what became more than two years of pandemic-interrupted shooting. Wikler was convinced that Quannah and Jody’s story could resonate with a wider audience. “I felt there was a gap in the storytelling around climate for something that was relational and empathetic,” she says. “I was thinking, How can we get people who never set foot in Alaska to care about what’s happening there?” Fashion wasn’t initially on her radar, she says, “but there’s a saying in documentary film—if you end up with the story you started with, you didn’t do the film right.”

Quannah and Jody at a free Native Youth Outdoors snowboarding clinic near Fairbanks, Alaska (Photo: Emily Sullivan)

Walking Two Worlds has plenty to say about climate and activism. It’s also a deft portrait of a young woman coming into her own while navigating two different realities: her traditional culture and the flashy realm of haute couture. Jody, who watches over Quannah’s career as her “mom-ager,” experienced a similar tension—between her dreams for the future and a feeling of responsibility to her community and her culture—when she left Alaska in the late 1990s to attend college in the lower 48. While raising Quannah and her two brothers, she says, she taught them how to find their way, “to make sure they were really grounded in their culture and had a connection to their Indigenous lands, but also that they could still be successful in the modern world.”

It’s been heartening for Quannah and Jody to see that message getting attention in their own community—the realities of Native life are too rarely depicted on screen—but the hope was always to broaden the reach. “I want my community to be heard and seen in the right way,” Quannah says. “Not a stereotype, not a fake version of what this industry wants Natives to look like or be like or sound like.”

That task of educating people can be challenging. Her traditional facial tattoos, which are called Yidiiltoo and represent a part of Han Gwich’in culture that was long suppressed, often draw questions. “Someone at a job recently was really intrigued by my tattoos and everything about me,” Quannah says. “I was explaining that I was Native American from Alaska and from South Dakota, that my bloodlines come from two tribes, and they just couldn’t comprehend it.”

Quannah hopes the film will help people understand not just where she comes from, but how threatened her home and her culture are. In it we see her walking through burned stands of trees near the family’s Yukon River fish camp, the result of a wildfire. This summer, the village experienced an unprecedented heat wave and abnormally high river temperatures.

Near Jody’s cabin, other fish camps were quiet as they faced a fourth straight summer of , forcing a closure to subsistence harvests. “The salmon are one of our main food sources,” Jody says, “so we’re facing food insecurity, but also the loss of our culture.” The shared knowledge behind the use of salmon—catching, filleting, smoking, canning, utilizing every part—is passed down through generations on the riverbanks. Without fishing, that doesn’t happen.

Quannah preparing for the Met Gala in 2021 (Photo: Keri Oberly)

Quannah acknowledges the inherent tension between her activism and the fashion industry’s carbon footprint. But she hopes to use her influence to nudge companies in the right direction. “It’s possible to be a part of these industries and create changes and inspire change,” she says. “I always tell people you have to be at the table where they’re making these decisions.”

That messaging strategy seems to be working, both through her own following (more than half a million on ) and through reposts from new fashion-world connections like Gigi and Bella Hadid (78 million and 59 million followers, respectively), who have shared some of her calls to action with their fans.

This can all be a heavy burden for a young person, and it isn’t always easy to stay upbeat. “A lot of my generation, including myself, have climate anxiety,” Quannah says. “It’s a true feeling of being worried about our future.” But amid the pressure, expectations, and demands, she’s found ways to stay grounded in her new home base of Los Angeles, where she FaceTimes frequently with her mom and extended family and “impulsively” got a dog, a black German shepherd named Pepper, who she takes on hikes every day that she’s home.

When life becomes too much, the ultimate tonic is being back in Eagle Village, a place where she feels understood and embraced, and where her thoughts turn to future plans—like creating a space to host youth camps and community discussions, and growing , an organization the family recently founded to help Indigenous kids connect with nature.

As our conversation wound down, I asked Jody and Quannah what the plans were for the rest of her visit. It was raining, and they decided some new tattooing might be in order. The next day, they planned to load up their skiff and head downriver for a camping trip on the beach.

“That’s my favorite thing to do,” Quannah says. “Just build a fire and be at camp. Summertime—it’s just so fun, because you’re on the river, you get to fish and swim and all those good things.”

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This Fall’s Best New Outdoor Books, Films, and Podcasts

jversteegh — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 16:31:07 +0000

This fall is packed with new outdoor media releases: books on calving glaciers and the surprising biology of asphalt, documentaries that will take you from the summit of Mount Everest to the hollers of Appalachia, and podcasts that offer thrilling tales and life lessons from outdoor mishaps. Here are our top picks for what to read, watch, and listen to between your adventures this season.

Books

The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth, by Elizabeth Rush ($30)

(Photo: Courtesy Milkweed Editions)

For a chunk of ice containing enough meltwater to raise the oceans two feet, not much is known about Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier. That is why, in 2019, Elizabeth Rush joined an international group of scientists on the first expedition to its calving edge. “I wanted to stand alongside that massive glacier,” she writes in The Quickening, “wanted to witness freshly formed bergs dropping down into the ocean like stones, so that I might know in my body what my mind still struggled to grasp: Antarctica’s going to pieces has the power to rewrite all the maps.” The journey takes place as Rush is about to start a family, and she grapples with the idea of bringing a child into our climate disaster-in-progress. Rush, whose previous book, , was a Pulitzer finalist, writes with urgency and humor about this consequential world of ice—and the life that will soon be growing inside her.

The Race to Be Myself, by Caster Semenya ($30)

(Photo: Courtesy W. W. Norton)

Birth is, of course, central to the story of South African runner Caster Semenya, the two-time Olympic gold medalist subjected to invasive gender testing after winning the 800-meter event at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin. In her memoir, due out in October, Semenya recounts how she was accepted as a tomboy in her rural village, only to later experience humiliating speculation about her body when her test results, which revealed elevated testosterone levels and some physical characteristics of both sexes, were leaked to the press. Forced for years to take estrogen to continue her career, in 2018 she was effectively barred from competition by stricter testosterone rules. Since then the conversation about gender has only grown more urgent as questions linger about the treatment of her and other female African runners with naturally high testosterone levels. Her ordeal, she writes, “has affected me in ways I cannot describe, although I will try.” In this defiant, moving book, she succeeds.

Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, by Ben Goldfarb ($30)

(Photo: Courtesy W. W. Norton)

“Like most people, I at once cherish animals and think nothing of piloting a thousand-pound death machine,” writes Ben Goldfarb in this way-more-fun-than-it-should-be book about asphalt, out in September. The author of , Goldfarb has a lot to say about our national compulsion to pave a path from everywhere to everywhere else, cutting off migration routes and turning cars into superpredators. He finds hope in innovative wildlife crossings that have created a new bridge-and-tunnel crowd of coyotes, toads, and elk herds. Whether he’s tracking pronghorn antelope through Wyoming or tossing off asides about hedgehogs (“small, plodding, nocturnal … practically designed to be roadkill”), a road trip with him is worth every fascinating mile.

True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America, by Betsy Gaines Quammen ($27)

(Photo: Courtesy Torrey House)

The dangerous myth of the West as an endless frontier is still alive, writes historian Betsy Gaines Quammen in True West, out in October. But today it draws a new kind of freedom seekers, from adventurers eager to “rip, shred, bag, and slay” its peaks and rivers to anti-vaxxers determined to raise a middle finger to the feds. Quammen, author of , has spent years investigating a region that “has become ever hotter, drier, angrier, and more politically polarized,” from the Idaho origins of the Oath Keepers—whose members stormed the U.S. Capitol in 2021—to the billionaire recreationists holed up at Montana’s Yellowstone Club. But Quammen treats all her subjects with empathy, and she doesn’t look down on anyone. “The West is more than a playground or a storage site awaiting resource extraction,” she writes. “It’s more than a second home or a selfie. It’s a land of many cultures. It’s a place of countless generations.”

Sun House, by David James Duncan ($35)

(Photo: Courtesy Little, Brown)

Perhaps all is not lost on the frontier. In this big-hearted “eastern Western,” cult favorite David James Duncan explores what might happen if we dished up some karmic payback to the white-guy corporations looking to “divvy up, privatize, cage, clear-cut, dam, drain, mine, frack, and detonate” every last acre. This is Duncan’s first novel since his bestsellers (1983) and (1992). It’s a cosmic trip that braids together a dozen lives that cross and gurgle like the fictional Elkmoon River. Do we object that it isn’t until page 363 that these freethinkers begin to converge on Montana’s Elkmoon Range? We do not. Do we care that the text is 764 pages, not counting an extensive bibliography? Indeed we do, but in a good way, because it allows us to ride this magic bus as long as we can. Stoke the cabin fire and pour some whiskey over a chunk of glacial ice. You’re not coming out until you’ve finished this one.

Films

Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest

(Photo: Courtesy Follow Your Dream Foundation)

The inspiring, ultimately tragic story of Pasang Lhamu Sherpa is a lesser-known chapter in mountaineering history. Pasang perished while descending Everest in 1993, after becoming the first Nepali woman to summit. Director Nancy Svendsen first met Pasang’s daughter, Dawa Futi Sherpa—an executive producer on —a dozen years ago. Together they deliver a subtle, sensitive tracing of Pasang’s life against the backdrop of Nepal in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Those were pivotal years in the country’s quest for democracy and in the development of modern commercial climbing on Everest, which is powered largely by the hard work and heroism of unheralded, underpaid teams of Sherpas. Pasang was an uneducated Sherpa woman from a small village; her vast ambition and determination were truly singular and not always appreciated. What emerges is an incredibly timely story. In Pasang’s quest to empower Sherpas in the climbing industry, and both women and Sherpas in Nepali society, she was a trailblazer. Limited theatrical release in September; streaming on Amazon by November

Explorer: Lost in the Arctic

(Photo: Courtesy National Geographic)

The Northwest Passage has lured adventurers for centuries, but the prospect of a sea route above the North American continent has remained mostly a deadly fantasy. In the overheated present, dwindling summer ice pack has now made the journey feasible, though hardly easy. In June 2022, writer and adventurer Mark Synnott assembled a team—including filmmaker Renan Ozturk—and set out from Maine aboard Synnott’s 47-foot sailboat. Their goal was to retrace a famously failed 1845 British expedition led by Sir John Franklin, whose two ships and 129 crew members vanished after their ships became stuck in the ice near King William Island. It’s a mystery that has long fascinated polar historians, and Synnott and crew go to great lengths to solve it, culminating in a search for Franklin’s rumored grave. The voyage is full of tribulation—bad weather, equipment failure, unreliable maps, and, in a dire historical echo, a close call with becoming icebound themselves—and the result is a worthy follow-up to Synnott and Ozturk’s collaborations for National Geographic’s Explorer series, Lost on Everest and The Last Tepui. Streaming now on Disney+ and Hulu

King Coal

(Photo: Courtesy Drexler/CottageM/Fishbowl)

You may think you know the story of coal in Appalachia, but Elaine McMillion Sheldon’s subtle and affecting tribute to her home region mixes closely observed documentary reporting with imaginative, poetic material to arrive at something new, though no less heartbreaking. Sheldon, the daughter and granddaughter of coal miners, is well positioned to dive into the human stories that show what coal has given and taken from Appalachian communities. is an ode to a place that sees beauty amid the harshness, but isn’t blind to the scars on the land or the damage that has carried through the generations. Environmental docs can feel stripped of nuance, all stridency and condemnation, but Sheldon uses every tool in the filmmaking kit—from sound design to music to the casting of several endearing young locals—to successfully connect her audience to the beauty and tragedy of her home. Theatrical release August 11; available on Amazon, Google Play , and iTunes in mid-October

Full Circle

(Photo: Courtesy Level 1 Production)

Director Josh Berman invites us into the lives and worlds of Barry Corbet and Trevor Kennison, two men left paralyzed by spinal injuries that resulted from snow-sports accidents. Each narrative is inspirational—the film’s subtitle is —but Berman doesn’t shy from the harsh realities of life as a paraplegic. Corbet built an impressive climbing and skiing résumé in the 1950s and 1960s; one of North America’s most famous ski runs, Corbet’s Couloir in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, was named after him. In May 1968, he was paralyzed from the waist down after a helicopter crash while filming in the Aspen backcountry. Kennison’s pre-injury experience was shorter, but he found the same joy in the mountains, and suffered a similar spinal injury while snowboarding in the Colorado backcountry in 2014. Corbet refused to slow down, making films and learning to kayak; for Kennison, the discovery of sit-skiing gave him back the sense of purpose Corbet found on the river. In a post-injury triumph that Corbet, who passed away in 2004, would’ve been proud of, the film opens with Kennison dropping into Corbet’s Couloir on a sit-ski during the Kings and Queens of Corbet’s contest in 2019. Nationwide theatrical release in late October; streaming release in early 2024

Podcasts

FOGO: Fear of Going ��ԹϺ��

(Photo: Courtesy Spotify)

Ivy Le is a self-described indoor person, and her reluctance to host this unusual nature show from Spotify Studios is evidenced by the many sighs, screams, and ughs she sprinkles into her attempts to understand the appeal of the whole outdoors thing. Le takes friends and experts out on educational adventures, which include learning to camp (season one) and learning to hunt (season two). There’s a trip to REI with her friend Jeff Zhao that’s narrated like a nature documentary; a hike with outdoor activist Rocío Villalobos; and an archery lesson in which Le silences her doubters and hits a target while doing an Asian squat. Whether you’re new to outdoor recreation or a seasoned pro, the podcast is a delight thanks to Le, a charmingly vulnerable asker of deep questions about communing with nature. For example: What’s the difference between walking and hiking? “Hiking is sexier,” outdoor educator Diane Carrico tells her, “and it feels like you’re bragging.”

Thru

(Photo: Courtesy QCode)

Whether he’s fighting off a nasty bout of norovirus or encountering a mystery animal on an early-morning hike, podcast producer Cody Hofmockel is never truly alone during his preparation for and through-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail. Hofmockel started on April 23, 2022, and recorded a remarkable amount of his experience to create a nearly day-by-day audio documentary. Produced by QCode and Spoke Media, the podcast consists of brief episodes that take us into the ups and downs of trail life: making friends, devising silly games to pass the time, and no small amount of what happens when that virus hits his stomach. Hofmockel, who recovered from substance-abuse issues in 2020 and “reconnected with his newly sober mind” during the hike, also ponders the reasons for walking 2,653 miles and gives colorful fellow through-hikers plenty of mic time. Listening to Thru feels like getting deftly produced voice notes from a friend who’s somewhere between Mexico and Canada.

Women’s Work

(Photo: Courtesy NPR)

Ashley Ahearn spends much of the first episode of Women’s Work—a production of Boise State Public Radio—getting dirty looks from an extremely pregnant ewe named Babette. Ahearn, an environmentalist and chronicler of life in the West, gets right into the middle of things for an on-the-ground look at how our food systems should be reformed. As cattle rancher Cory Carman tells her: “Our limitation is not that we can’t feed the world, it’s that we can’t imagine what it’s going to take.” From Wyoming to eastern Washington, Ahearn visits women ranchers who are rethinking how to manage land and livestock. Kelsey Scott of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe champions food sovereignty with grass-fed beef, and 14-year-old Maloi Lannan learns the ropes of regenerative ranching while helping out at her family’s sheep farm. Each offers ideas for making food production more just and sustainable—and shows how some ranchers are already fighting for a better future.

Wilder

(Photo: Courtesy iHeart)

So many children grew up devouring Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiographical Little House on the Prairie books—only to look back and find that the series doesn’t always hold up. In Wilder, host Glynnis MacNicol reckons with the legacy of the most well-known young-adult depiction of the late-19th-century American West. The show, produced by iHeartPodcasts, is nothing short of comprehensive. In the first, nearly hour-long episode, MacNicol visits a Little House fan meetup in a town where many Hmong immigrants found a home, thanks in large part to their love of the books, and discusses the books’ racist depictions of Indigenous people with Debbie Reese, founder of American Indians in Children’s Literature. MacNicol embarks on an ambitious journey—hitting all the places Wilder lived, in six states—digging into her own memory of the books and attempting to understand the relevance of the series in the 21st century. As her friend and coproducer Jo Piazza puts it: “The many ways that Laura seems flawed are also the many ways that America is flawed.”

Lost Hills: The Dark Prince

(Photo: Courtesy Pushkin)

New Yorker staff writer Dana Goodyear is the bard of Malibu, California, explaining the swanky town’s dark underbelly over three seasons of Lost Hills. The latest introduces the famous and controversial surfer Miki Dora, who dazzled and terrorized the city’s shores from the 1950s through the ’70s. “His nickname was Da Cat,” says surfer Denny Aaberg, “because he had feline grace on a wave and not because he was a cat burglar, but I guess he was that, too.” From a neglected childhood to multiple crimes that put him on the run for seven years, Dora’s story is by no means a simple hero’s journey. Goodyear delves into the misogynistic and xenophobic nature of his territorial surf philosophy, and calls on a who’s who of surfing—from Kelly Slater to Kathy Kohner-Zuckerman—to talk about the life and times of a man who embodies a legendary era in the sport, along with its worst impulses.

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What the Hell Is Going on with the Pebble Mine?

lwhelan — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When that Tom Collier, the CEO of Alaska’s long-stalled and highly controversial Pebble Mine project, was resigning after being ensnared in an environmental sting, it was just the latest shocking twist in the proposed mine’s yearslong saga of turnabouts and changes of fortune.��

The massive copper, gold, and molybdenum deposit is situated near the headwaters of two river systems that help sustain southwest Alaska’s pristine Bristol Bay region and its legendary salmon run. Discovered over 30 years ago, its development has long been opposed by��Native groups and fishermen, who believe an open-pit mine poses too great a threat to the ecosystem, not to mention the lives, culture, and $1.5 billion fishing economy that all depend on it.��

Since Canadian mining company Northern Dynasty Minerals acquired the rights to Pebble nearly two decades ago, residents and fishermen have lived in an uncomfortable purgatory, as the proposed mine’s prospects have waxed and waned and financial backers, governors, and presidents have come and gone. But even by this saga’s standards, the past few months have been remarkable, with twists and turns that include a cameo from Donald Trump��Jr.��and the release of secretly recorded video calls between mining-company executives and investigators posing as investors. Now, with Joe Biden should he win, the fate of this pristine slice of Alaska may hinge, like so much else, on the presidential election. Here’s everything you need to know to catch up on what’s happened.

A New CEO, a��New Administration, a��New Life

In 2010, six Bristol Bay tribes petitioned the EPA to intervene��and��block the mine’s development, and��after years of study and legal battles, the agency deemed the mine��too great of a risk to the area’s salmon. By the middle of Barack Obama’s second presidential term, in 2014, the EPA��was poised to use its authority under the Clean Water Act to veto the project.

That’s when Washington, D.C., lawyer Tom Collier was hired as CEO of the Pebble Limited Partnership, the subsidiary responsible for developing the deposit for Northern Dynasty, which owns the mineral rights to the state-owned land. (The “partnership” part is a bit aspirational at this point: Northern Dynasty is the sole owner, after various mining-company partners .) Collier, a career Beltway insider, was tasked with trying to bring the project back from the brink by making the EPA problem go away. He orchestrated an extensive legal and lobbying strategy that succeeded in stalling the agency’s��final decision in court just long enough to outlast the Obama administration. When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Collier knew the��favorable combination of a pro-extraction president and a muzzled EPA might not last, so he had one goal: to file a mine plan capable of attaining its first major permit by the end of Trump’s first term. To underscore that objective, that if he achieved the permit within four years of applying for it, he’d be due an “extraordinary bonus” of $12.5 million on top of his nearly $2 million annual compensation.

“If it hadn’t been for the election of Trump, I firmly believe this project would have been dead in 2017,” says Joel Reynolds, western director and senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), who has spent years directing the nonprofit’s fight against Pebble. “But Trump breathed new life into it.”

In December 2017, with the EPA action withdrawn, Pebble filed an application with the Army Corps of Engineers for its first federal permit, which would grant it��permission to excavate and fill in wetlands. The application proposed a smaller, shorter-duration mine, operating at a shallower depth and extracting a tiny fraction of the deposit’s known reserves. The plan was designed, ostensibly, as a responsible alternative to the more ambitious proposals Pebble had floated in investor materials over the years. The corps then laid out what many observers saw as an timeline for completing an environmental review for a project of this size and complexity, one that would enable it to wrap up before the end of Trump’s term. (By comparison, the review process for another controversial Alaskan mine project, , took nearly six years.)��

From Pebble’s perspective, it was��finally getting a fair shake, unimpeded by what it��had seen as politically driven interference by the EPA, and the timeline seemed reasonable, a function of efficiency rather than urgency. “The corps has been able to do their work efficiently, largely because of all the work we put in ahead of time,” says Mike Heatwole, Pebble’s head of public affairs. “We have the information, and we’re able to work expeditiously on our end of it, so we’re not slowing things down, either.”

“I don’t think anyone anticipated the level to which we would be railroaded in this process,” said the executive director of United Tribes of Bristol Bay.

But to critics, the smaller plan seemed like a bait and switch, aimed at establishing a beachhead for a future larger mine, or even a district of many neighboring mines. The $8.6 million since 2017 seemed further evidence of a politically driven process that felt rushed and wasn’t inclusive. Native voices, in particular, have felt marginalized throughout.

“From the get-go, our voices have been silenced and ignored,” says Alannah Hurley, the executive director of��,��a consortium that represents 15 tribes in the region. “But I don’t think anyone anticipated the level to which we would be railroaded in this process.” Concerns brought up by Native groups during and after the review process were disregarded��she says, and there are of corps officials and contractors at one village meeting arguing with elders about disputed locations of culturally important sites and subsistence hunting and fishing grounds. “They were literally yelling at tribal leaders,” says Hurley. (A corps spokesman, when asked about the��allegation, declined to comment.)

That brings us to mid-July 2020, when much of the region was preoccupied with a tense, pandemic-tinged, but ultimately successful fishing season—53.5 million salmon returned, and there were no big COVID outbreaks. On July 15, that the Army Corps of Engineers had finished its final draft of the Environmental Impact Statement, the project review that would form the basis for the corps’s��decision to approve or deny Pebble’s permit. When the was published on July 24, it was a big day for Pebble, the culmination of its post-2017 effort, and it saw vindication. “From the beginning, we dedicated the time, resources, and technical work to ensure we had a project that could be done responsibly,” Collier said in a . “The final EIS for Pebble unequivocally shows it can be developed without harming salmon populations.”

A Surprising Turn

Northern Dynasty’s announcement of the positive EIS sent its stock price climbing for a week, but by the time the EIS was actually published, the price had already peaked and started falling. In fact, there about the company’s economic fundamentals—a series of blue-chip mining companies have walked away from their partnerships with Northern Dynasty over the years. Northern Dynasty is a junior mining company, and an undercapitalized one at that, more suited to mineral exploration than full-scale mine development. Without the backing of a major, deep-pocketed company, there’s no way it could fund a mine-construction process that would cost . “Its entire business plan is to get a permit from the corps and use that permit to get an investor,” says the NRDC’s Reynolds. “But the legitimate part of the industry is not interested.”��

Meanwhile, the science used to justify the mine, including in the final EIS, is hardly solid. “The document is a joke,” says Daniel Schindler, a professor at the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery��Sciences, who has spent 24 summers studying Bristol Bay with the university’s . “It’s a three-ring circus, where science is basically a shroud behind which they’re playing politics.” He says the EIS is built on unsupported assumptions and, crucially, understates potential impacts and ignores the fact that refuse from the mine would have the potential to pollute the landscape, not just during the life span of the mine��but forever after.��

These criticisms were largely ignored until the first week of August, when Pebble hit more turbulence, this time from an unexpected source: well-connected Republicans. First came an ��from Nick Ayers, a former Mike Pence chief of staff and an avid fisherman, who said that he, “like millions of conservationists and sportsmen,” hoped the president would direct the EPA to block the mine. An hour later, this was by Donald Trump��Jr., who wrote, “As a sportsman who has spent plenty of time in the area I agree 100%. The headwaters of Bristol Bay and the surrounding fishery are too unique and fragile to take any chances with.” It’s widely known that Trump��Jr. is an avid fisherman, and lodge owners in Bristol Bay who have hosted him have periodically whispered that he might be a useful ally. But nobody expected him to publicly open a rift with his father’s administration. A slew of celebrity tweets and news coverage followed, many echoing what Jimmy Kimmel said when he became one of the 2,300 or so people to ��Trump��Jr.’s opinion: “I never thought I’d say this, but @DonaldTrumpJr is right.” When asked by reporters about the tweet, the president said his son “has some very strong opinions and he is very much of an environmentalist” and that he would “look at both sides of it,” which was itself a monumental shift.

“I never thought I’d say this, but @DonaldTrumpJr is right,” tweeted��Jimmy Kimmel.

The hits kept coming. On August 8, Joe Biden came out against Pebble. “It’s no place for a mine,” he said in a . “The Obama-Biden administration reached that conclusion when we ran a rigorous, science-based process in 2014, and it is still true today.” More surprisingly, on August 14, Tucker Carlson aired an�� on his Fox News show, featuring Johnny Morris, CEO of Bass Pro Shops, who also spoke out against it. As Carlson noted on air, Pebble is the rare environmental issue that doesn’t split cleanly along partisan lines. “Suddenly you are seeing a number of Republicans,” he said, “including some prominent ones, including some very conservative ones, saying, ‘Hold on, maybe Pebble Mine is not a good idea, maybe you should do whatever you can not to despoil nature, and maybe not all environmentalism is about climate.’”��

Would anything come of this? For a moment, it seemed like it. On August 22, Politico posted a story from a D.C.-based reporter headlined “,” which claimed that early the following week, the administration would move to block the mine, according to six anonymous sources. What emerged two days later in a letter from the corps basically amounted to a request for a more rigorous plan for offsetting the mine’s impact on the thousands of acres of surrounding wetlands. It wasn’t nothing: it noted that the mine would cause “unavoidable adverse impacts” and “significant degradation,” which was harsher than anything the corps had said before, and it set what observers called a for mitigation. But the company wasn’t surprised by the letter’s contents and was already working on a mitigation plan.

To hedge against further confusion, Pebble had been�� on Fox News targeted at an audience of one. “President Trump, continue to stand tall, and don’t let politics enter the Pebble Mine review process,” said a spot that ran the night of September 16. It seems to have found its mark. At 10:20 P.M., Trump , “Don’t worry, wonderful and beautiful Alaska, there will be NO POLITICS in the Pebble Mine Review Process.”

The Sting

On September 21, outlining a set of secret video recordings, known as the , which had been recorded over the previous two months by the , a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. Posing as overseas investors, EIA operatives captured video calls showing an overconfident Collier and Ron Thiessen, Northern Dynasty’s equally bullish CEO, saying all the quiet parts out loud: that the actual plan was to eventually mine the entire ore body��rather than the smaller portion proposed, and to do so over the course of perhaps 200 years rather than 20. In their telling, the smaller mine was merely a temporary step to improve their chances of getting a permit.��

Most embarrassing, they made boastful claims about their closeness with and influence over all sorts of politicians and government officials. One person who came up was David Hobbie, director of regulatory affairs for the Alaska District and someone with strong influence over the final EIS. Collier called him “the decision maker” and said they met weekly and had become something close to friends. The corps issued a to the EIA’s recordings, citing “inaccuracies and falsehoods relating to the permit process and the relationship between our regulatory leadership and the applicant’s executives.”

The tapes were damning. “I’ve been at this 40 years, and I’ve never seen this happen to the blatant extent that the tapes reveal,” says the NRDC’s Reynolds. “It’s a testament to the flaws in our permitting system that it takes a videotape to force people to come to terms with that basic fraud.”

The fallout was swift, and the fall guy was Collier. “Collier’s comments embellished both his and the Pebble Partnership’s relationships with elected officials and federal representatives in Alaska,” said a announcing Collier’s resignation. “The comments were clearly offensive to these and other political, business, and community leaders in the state, and for this, Northern Dynasty unreservedly apologizes to all Alaskans.”��

It was a blow to the company, but Thiessen remains in his position. He’s quoted in the same release saying that he plans to keep advancing the application and expects a decision on the permit this fall.��

For those dedicated to fighting the mine, what the tapes revealed seemed less “embellished” than unvarnished, the true Pebble finally come to light. “Collier is one symptom of the much greater problem of this company terrorizing Bristol Bay for almost 20 years now,” says Hurley of the United Tribes of Bristol Bay. “Getting rid of him does absolutely nothing to rectify the entrenched issues.” To her, the flawed permitting process and alleged political influence taint the process beyond repair. “At this point, a permit denial is clearly needed,” she says. “Nobody has faith that’s going to happen—the corps hasn’t changed course or addressed this as a real issue.”

What Comes Next��

Indeed, despite all the drama, the corps has tried to forge ahead, saying little. “The District is currently in the deliberative process of making a permit decision,” a spokesman emailed in response to my questions. “While doing so, it is inappropriate for us to comment on opinions, to speculate on potential outcomes of our deliberations in response to media inquiries.”

And though Pebble always seems to be running out of time or money (or both), the company plans to file the mitigation plan that the corps requested before the mid-November deadline, and the corps stands ready to receive it. The final EIS that so many stakeholders see as flawed is still the governing document, and Pebble, for its part, is sticking to its plan. “Throughout the course of this project, we’ve hit a lot of potholes or road bumps, and we find a way to keep pressing forward,” says Pebble spokesman Heatwole. “We want to get a positive decision from the corps, secure a partner, and get into state permitting. Those are our milestones.”

With any decision almost certain to lead to litigation, there won’t be any immediate moves, even if the corps does issue a decision this fall. But as the impact of the tapes has rippled outward, the controversy has managed to do something that Alaskans had not been able to: get their two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, on the record after years of noncommittal fence-sitting. What that means remains to be seen, but they could help call for congressional investigations. They could also push through the appropriations bill to which the House attached an amendment that would cut off funding for the corps’s work on Pebble, effectively freezing the permit application. That bill could be taken up by the Senate as soon as December. And if the corps issues a positive final decision on the permit during a potential lame-duck period, the senators could support the EPA in taking steps to block Pebble. (It’s also worth noting that the Pebble Tapes have become a major issue in Sullivan’s surprisingly against challenger Al Gross, a Democrat-leaning Independent.)

The lesson of Pebble may be that short-term political solutions are too tenuous to be relied on. “It’s clear we’re not dealing with agencies acting in the best interests of the American people, or in the way these systems are supposed to be working,” says Hurley. And that may be the biggest takeaway of all: that only in a broken system would regulatory decisions of this magnitude be influenced by a tweet from the president’s son or a well-placed ad on Fox News, or that they��would require secret videos from eco-spies to get senators to finally take a public stance.

Pebble’s opponents are hoping that if November 3 goes well for the Democrats,��the EPA will finally��be empowered to find a way to permanently block the mine, whatever decision the corps makes on the permit. “This project needs to die definitively,” says Reynolds of the NRDC. His hope is that the EPA will resume its Clean Water Act review in a Biden presidency, but even an EPA veto of the project could, theoretically, be overturned in the future. So for protection that puts Bristol Bay beyond the reach of the shifting political winds, they’ll need to keep working toward a long-term preservation plan for the area. “I’m hoping we can put this to bed,” Reynolds says, “and create a political landscape in Alaska that allows Alaskans to decide how to permanently protect the national treasure that is Bristol Bay.”

UPDATE (Oct 29, 2020):��After this article went to press, the EIA revealing the extent to which Northern Dynasty CEO Ron Thiessen, who is still running the company, plays a hands-on role in every aspect of Pebble’s development, and made statements to EIA’s investigators that were every bit as outrageous as those made by former Pebble CEO Tom Collier. The new tapes include Thiessen discussing his influence over Alaska’s senators and pro-Pebble governor, and an assertion that he believes the state of Alaska would contribute roughly $1.5 billion of taxpayer money to assist in building infrastructure for the mine.

UPDATE (Nov��25, 2020): The Army Corps of Engineers decided today�� for the Pebble Mine saying “it it does not comply with Clean Water Act guidelines” and calling the project “contrary to the public interest.” This latest twist in the saga will likely kill the proposed extraction project in the short term, but Pebble plans to appeal the decision, and the mine’s opponents are still hoping that the incoming Biden administration will consider more permanent protection for Bristol Bay.

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Would You Pay for a Subscription for Running Shoes?

wtaylor — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The life cycle of a running shoe, familiar to every runner, is a sad slide to oblivion: you start with a sparkly new shoe that puts a bounce in your step, which eventually becomes a weathered one that—even though it might cause you pain—you’re reluctant to throw in the trash. The lifespan for its intended purpose is short, and its eventual destination, more often than not, is the landfill.

Swiss footwear company On Running aims to change that with the introduction of , a new subscription service built around a fully recyclable��plant-based road shoe that runners never own in the traditional sense. Instead, customers pay a $30 monthly fee, receive new pairs as they need them, and send their old pairs back to the company to be recycled into new running shoes. It’s a novelty in the footwear sector��and a huge leap into the unknown. “We want to show that it is possible if a company really wants to do it,” says Caspar Coppetti, one of On’s��three founders. “Whether our consumers will adapt and really like it, we don’t know yet, but that’s part of this really big experiment.”

If you’ve seen some of On Running’s��more popular shoes around—sleek, minimalist uppers married to a footbed uniquely riddled with hollow cavities reminiscent of, yes, Swiss cheese—you may already have an inkling that this is a company that does things differently. The shoes’ different look started with an idea from former pro triathlete Olivier Bernhard, who was aiming for a feeling of “running on clouds.” He joined with his friends Coppetti and David Allemann to develop the prototype and found the company in 2010. Even as the brand has seen steady growth for a decade—now stocked in 6,000 stores in 55 countries—it has retained the feel of a small, founder-driven company, preferring word-of-mouth, organic growth over advertising and media coverage��and staying close to the founders’ ethics, particularly around sustainability.

“These are not traditional shoe people,” says Matt Powell, an analyst at the consumer trend research firm NPD Group. “They’re coming at a whole lot of things very unconventionally, and it’s working for them.”

Sustainability has been at the core of On’s ethos since its founding, but when the team��started looking at the company’s carbon footprint a few years ago, they quickly realized that upwards of 80 percent of their environmental impact came from the materials they used in their products—packaging, shipping, and everything else paled in comparison. “So we said, ‘OK, let’s reassess the impact of the material we use,’”��Coppetti��says. “Basically what we’re doing is disrupting our own business in a way, but the question for us became��how do we go from a linear industry to a circular industry?”

The circular economy model has been a popular topic in sustainable business discourse since at least the early 2000s, when William McDonough’s book helped popularize the idea of moving from a “cradle to grave” model—produce, use, dispose—to one that emphasizes closed-loop reuse and upcycling. But that’s easier said than done. “The circular economy business model is something a lot of people talk about��but very few actually do,” says Eban Goodstein, director of Bard’s program. “It’s not just tinkering on the margins. You’re actually building a whole new business model that’s centered around efficiencies associated with the recycling process.”

There have been some similar efforts in the clothing realm, with companies like focusing on repair and reuse of older products��and new launches like (which gives you credit for sending in your used clothes) and (which lets you sell your used products for credit) trying versions of a circular model. In the footwear world, recycling athletic shoes has long been a goal��but not a priority. Nike’s reuse program downcycles running shoes by grinding them up to be used in rubberized surfaces on tracks and playgrounds. Adidas created a recyclable shoe, the in 2019, but the idea hasn’t advanced . Earlier this month, Salomon announced a fully recyclable shoe to debut in 2021, the , and while customers will be able to print a label to ship the shoe back to Salomon��for free, the company hasn’t settled on incentives for returning them, although a representative says they’re working on some. So, while there’s an increasingly strong feeling that the circular idea’s time has come, no shoe company has yet been able to close the loop.

When On began seriously developing the Cyclon about three years ago, it focused on addressing two primary challenges: creating a fully recyclable shoe��and making sure it got the shoes back. For the latter problem, Coppetti says, the subscription model was perfect. “Other industries have gone from owning to renting,” he says.��“So once we started thinking about the subscription model as a tool, a means to an end, we got pretty excited.”

Consumers are increasingly accustomed to subscription-based products (think Netflix, Dollar Shave Club, Blue Apron) and to renting rather than owning (cars, bikes, phones), and they’re increasingly aware of the environmental footprint of their consumption. “Now more than ever, people are looking to companies who stand for something and have actual values behind them, and climate change is obviously a big dimension of that,” says Bard’s Goodstein. “Who knows if they’ll get it right, but they’re committing to something that’s a systemic change. Growing these ethical brands is changing capitalism.”

So far, the response has been good. On signed 2,000 subscribers in the first 48 hours after launching on September 15.

As for the shoe, what On came up with is undyed and unadorned, made with a minimum of 50 percent plant-based content derived from castor beans (a number the brand hopes to drive up to 70 or 80 percent before the shoes ship), every part of it recyclable. On also knew it could not risk sacrificing performance—no matter how much people value sustainability, they first and foremost want a product that works—and claims the lightweight, seven-ounce road shoe performs so well that some of the same components will be used by On-sponsored athletes in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics.

And as bad as 2020 has been for most businesses, it may be a good time to launch a new shoe: the pandemic has seen�� and other more self-contained exercise options. On and its competitor Hoka are among a handful of brands that, rather than being hurt by COVID, throughout this year.

Running is in some ways the perfect category to trial this model: unlike a bike or a kayak, most serious runners replace their shoes frequently, and at this price point, you’d have to run pretty regularly to get your money’s worth. On’s website recommends that runners , which means if you run 20 miles per week, you’d need three replacements a year. The yearly subscription cost ($360)��divided by three ($120)��is in line with the starting point of other high-end offerings in the marketplace (including On), which start around $130 and often run up to $180.

That turnover would provide the company with another interesting opportunity: the subscription model will let On continue tweaking the product. “It’s almost like a software business model,” Coppetti says. “You’ll always get the most up-to-date version. It’s a much more contemporary way of doing business.”

But first,��On has��to get runners to buy in.��“I think the two real barriers are��can you make a product that performs and is also recyclable, and second, can this scale to the point where they can make money from it,” asks sports market expert Powell. “Runners are very specific about their shoes, so it’s going to depend on how many people find this a great running shoe for them, and whether that scales to a level that they can make it work.” On says it needs 5,000 people to sign up per region before it��ships the shoes to reduce the carbon footprint of the transportation. (The brand defines regions by . The United States��is the only country with two warehouses.)

So far, the response has been good. On signed 2,000 subscribers in the first 48 hours after launching on September 15, and its ambitious goals give some idea of the scale it’s��aiming to achieve: the company��hopes for 30,000 by the end of the year and 200,000 by the time the first shoe ships in the second half of 2021.

Whether the brand can build that kind of momentum or not remains to be seen. On knows it’s taking a big risk. “We’re going in a little naive,” Coppetti told me. “We’re not saying we found the holy grail. We’re saying we have an obligation to try things, and we might fail, and we’re aware of it, but if everyone’s too scared to try, we never move forward.”

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A New Documentary Explores One Man’s Whale Obsession

wyu — Wed, 08 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

“OK, we’re going to put the sperm whale in the refrigerator, because we’re not working on it just yet,” said Joy Reidenberg, a professor at the Center for Anatomy and Functional Morphology at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, as casually as if she were telling a child to put away some leftovers. “We’ll start with the minke.”

It was the summer of 2018, and Reidenberg, who is one of the world’s foremost experts on whale anatomy, was walking through a 12th-floor lab, its windows framing rooftop views of the Manhattan skyline. A dozen stainless-steel gurneys lined the wall at one end of the long lab room, each with a human cadaver on top, draped in a white sheet, awaiting the return of their medical students. On the other end were the juvenile sperm and minke whale heads the lab had just received, one from the and one from the . The day’s task was to do CT scans of both heads and then dissect the minke and try to extract its brain, intact. While we waited for the minke head to thaw so dissection could begin, we toured the collection of whale skulls in her office (she has more stashed at home in her garage) and went to the cafeteria for some coffee.

I’d been invited to observe this odd scene by wildlife filmmaker , who was filming The Whale Detective, on PBS’s long-running , now in its 38th season. Mustill has spent his career traveling the world and making award-winning documentaries for the BBC, often built around fascinating creatures—bats, giraffes, and kangaroos, to name just a few—and the equally fascinating people dedicated to studying and saving them. (I’ve known him for 15 years or so and have previously.) But while his past films have featured narration by , Mustill narrated this one himself. It was clear he did not relish this leap into the personal, but the whale—his whale—sort of forced the issue.

In September 2015, Mustill and a friend, Charlotte Kinloch, were paddling a tandem kayak in Monterey Bay, California, on a whale-watching tour when a 30-ton humpback breached and came within feet of landing directly on them. They were knocked from their boat and quickly rescued, but video footage of the incident captured by nearby whale-watchers went viral, rapidly racking up millions of views. In the weeks afterward, Mustill found himself watching and rewatching the clip, growing more and more obsessed. As he ruminates in the film, “How can you get that close to something so big, with that much power, and not die?”

It’s a coincidence so perfect that it seems contrived—wildlife filmmaker landed on by a breaching whale, film to come—but Mustill’s background is what makes him the perfect candidate to investigate this case. His deep dive into the behavior of the humpback turned into a wide-ranging look at the precarious state of whales that became The Whale Detective.

Early in The Whale Detective, Mustill hands Reidenberg his phone to watch a video of the breach. “The thing that really surprised me when I saw that video was that whale didn’t do what I would think of as a normal breach,” Reidenberg says. The humpback appeared to have done a bit of an aerial twist, rotating its mass away from the kayak. “You guys would have been dead if it had landed with the back of its head on you.”

Mustill’s quest in the film focuses on two big questions: First, had the whale deliberately attacked them, or had it, as Reidenberg implied, turned away from them in midair, perhaps to spare them? Second, would it be possible to locate this whale again? But before he could begin to answer those questions, he had to start his detective work with some simpler ones, like why whales breach in the first place.

Lab manager Bridget Wicinski, Joy Reidenberg, Tom Mustill, and cameraman Tim Burgess examining the minke whale head (Tim Sohn)

Reidenberg cutting away connective tissue to free the minke brain (Tim Sohn)

Wicinski extracting the minke brain (Tim Sohn)

“We don’t even know what breaches are about,” Reidenberg tells Mustill in the film. “There’s lots of theories, but nobody really knows for sure. Nobody can get inside the head and ask the whale, ‘Why did you do that thing?’” This is the first hint of just how little we understand about our leviathan cousins, in spite of their iconic place in our consciousness and culture. We don’t know how many humpback whales there are, how long they live, what their songs are for. We glimpse them briefly as they evanesce at the ocean’s surface, and then they dive out of sight and into a world we’ll never know.

As Mustill sets about educating himself and his viewers on all things cetacean, he proves an able narrator, equal parts obsessive Ahab and didactic Cousteau. He has a deft touch with interviews, and, as with many of his previous films, the animals share the stage with an engaging community of scientists and enthusiasts who have spent their lives studying and protecting them.

He dispatches quickly with the intentional-aggression angle. Whales rarely attack humans, but Mustill tracks down one victim, , who was knocked out by a gray whale that he surprised while trying to get an underwater shot of mating off the coast of Baja, Mexico. (The camera kept rolling, however, and he ended up with a unique shot of a 12-foot-long whale penis, achieved while he was unconscious.) And yet he continues diving with whales to this day. “[They] can so easily hurt you, even unintentionally,” Hall says, a touch of wonder in his voice, “and they tend not to.”

The altruistic argument—that the whale deliberately spared them—seems at first like wishful thinking, an exercise in anthropomorphizing random animal behavior. But that humpbacks in particular have a sheepdog’s protective streak. They have been observed defending sea lions and dolphins and even chasing orcas away from a gray whale calf they’d just killed. The most remarkable example in the film is the story of , who was unnerved when a humpback in the Cook Islands in the South Pacific tried to tuck her under its fin, harassing her for ten minutes. Eventually, Hauser realized the whale was guiding her back to her boat. Only once she was there did she see a tiger shark. The whale, Hauser believes, was protecting her. “This is not a normal thing,” Hauser says. “I just know that it’s incredible altruistic behavior.”

To answer his second question, whether he’d be able to find his whale, Mustill consults , a Monterey-based specialist in whale vocalization. Ryan informs him that Mustill and Kinloch had paddled into a whale feeding frenzy: on that day, a 150-foot-deep, mile-long layer of anchovies had massed at the mouth of the underwater canyon that funnels whales toward Monterey Bay. It turns out that a nearly unprecedented 51 humpbacks were identified that day. The huge crowd of whales made identifying Mustill’s humpback difficult, but eventually Mustill and Ted Cheeseman, founder of that crowdsources photos from whale-watchers, land on one they call Prime Suspect, whose pectoral-fin markings and timeline align with the breaching whale.

A curious young humpback whale approaches cinematographer Howard Hall. (Michele Hall)

Prime Suspect’s tail bears scars from an entanglement with a rope or fishing gear, Mustill learns, which hints at a darker storyline that runs through much of the film. After aggressive hunting brought whales to the brink of extinction, whale populations have rebounded incredibly over the past 50 years, since commercial whaling was banned in the 1970s. But recently, there’s been an increase in whale strandings and deaths from boat strikes and entanglement with fishing gear. Mustill sees some of this carnage up close. He is with Reidenberg as she responds to a report of a dead whale in San Francisco Bay. After locating abnormal bruising and a spinal column that’s been snapped out of place, the cause of death for this young female fin whale is obvious: boat strike, by a very large boat. “It’s a tragedy more than anything else,” she says. That whales are once again in danger becomes fuel for Mustill’s obsessive fire: If the whale had indeed spared them, did they not have an obligation to try to make sure it was OK?

The minke head on the table in Reidenberg’s lab that day was also likely struck by a ship before it washed up on shore. Once it was fully thawed and beginning to leak blood, Reidenberg took up the bone saw, and the room soon filled with an acrid smell, like burnt hair. She incised a six-inch-wide trapdoor in the top of the skull, then she and an assistant pried the bone flap out using small chisels and a mallet. After cutting away some of the connective membrane around the brain, it still seemed stuck.

“If I tilt this up, you think it will slide out?” Reidenberg asked the rest of the team, her right hand wrist-deep in the head. They pumped some water into the cavity to help loosen it up. “We’re trying to take it out without too much sloshing around or tearing.”

“From a filming perspective, the more intact the brain, the better,” Mustill said as his cameraman positioned himself.

The team lifted and tilted the head and eventually jostled the brain out of the small hole. “It’s not the prettiest brain we’ve seen,” Reidenberg said.

“No, it looks great,” said Mustill. “Can you lift it up?” Her assistant hoisted the grayish blob up for the camera for a Dr. Frankenstein moment, before depositing the baby whale’s brain, bigger than a human’s, in a bucket of formalin, destined for further study. The brain, Reidenberg explained, had begun to lose integrity as the ice crystals thawed, “like frozen fruit.” Mustill nodded, taking the analogy one step further. “Good for a smoothie but not for a tart.”

After the climactic moment, the film team began packing up. No longer at risk of ruining a shot, I wandered closer and leaned in toward the rubbery black skin of the whale’s head, inhaling deeply its sickly sweet odor. It smelled a little of death and a little of pumpkins but mostly like the sea, briny and fresh, with a whiff of sadness. And then Reidenberg shot me a look from across the room. “Keep your beard out of that whale!”

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‘Attla’ Tells the Story of Alaska’s Native Mushing Hero

jversteegh — Mon, 16 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Dogsled racing may seem like a curiosity—a hobby, a sport, an anachronism—but for a long time in remote Alaskan villages, dogsleds were essential to survival, the only way to get from place to place for much of the year.��They were an intrinsic part of these communities’ cultural fabric, and the skills to train and handle dogs were passed down through the generations. It was into this world that George Attla was born in 1933, in the tiny village of Huslia along the Yukon River. Attla would go on to become a rock star��of the dogsled world, a hero to Native Alaskans, winning dozens of the state’s biggest races from the late 1950s through the 1980s.��

But like so many aspects of indigenous��Alaskan culture, the latter half of the 20th century was not kind to Native dogsledding. The expense and effort required to keep a team of��dogs didn’t make sense in an internal-combustion world, and a larger cultural disruption further relegated mushing��to the fringes. Huslia grew more and more removed from its traditional ways��and began to struggle with issues like substance abuse, mental health, and suicide.��All of which left��Attla wondering whether this cultural and familial inheritance could be preserved—and perhaps even become a source of Native pride once again.��

Those questions and many more are at the center of the fine new documentary , premiering December��16��on PBS’s Independent Lens. The film, which is part biography, part sports documentary, and part elegy for a lost way of life, intercuts Attla’s remarkable story with his efforts to mentor his 20-year-old grandnephew, Joe Bifelt, who came home to the village from college in 2014��to spend a year learning at the knee of the great, though ailing, musher.

The film begins by traveling back to Attla’s childhood. After contracting bone��tuberculosis when he was eight, Attla was sent out of the village to a hospital in Sitka, over a thousand miles away, where he spent most of the next nine years undergoing and recovering from surgeries. He��emerges��with his right kneecap fused to the bone, giving him a lifelong limp and a unique gait. The physical trauma of his hospital stay was matched by a cultural one, as this young boy from a small Native village was dropped into the modern world. “The nurses was all white. I came from home and spoke just Indian,” Attla recalls in the film. “I couldn’t understand anything.” By the time he returned to the village at age 17, the cultural dissonance had reversed: he’d mostly forgotten the language and fallen out of step with his own culture. “I didn’t know how to trap, didn’t have a trade,” he recalls, “so I was caught between the two cultures.”��

For Attla, the search for a place to belong led to dogs, which were even more necessary to him than to the average villager. As one of his sisters says, the dogs “were like his legs,” helping him get around. And they were also a refuge, because while the rest of the village was calling him a “cripple” and saying he’d never amount to anything, the dogs didn’t notice his disability. “Dogs accept you as you are,” Attla says. “They don’t care what you look like, they don’t care what you sound like.”��

George Attla and his daughter, Amanda (Rob Stapleton)

And soon��nobody else much cared what he looked like either, because their homegrown hero started winning. He��turned��his traumatic childhood into fuel for his ambition��and even managed��to transform��his limp��into something more—a trademark strut, full of the swagger that defined the goateed, gum-chewing, aviator-sunglasses-wearing Attla as his profile rose. He was known throughout the state as the Huslia Hustler, and one gets the sense that the name had only partly to do with the speed of his dog teams. As documented in wonderful archival footage, newsreels, and radio commentary, he was a savvy operator, a gifted dog breeder and trainer, and eventually an��icon.��

Meanwhile, the film documents��Attla’s efforts to prepare Bifelt for the 2015 Open North American Championship, a prestigious three-day race around Fairbanks that Attla won eight times between 1969 and 1987. It’s a tall order, given that Bifelt had only ever been on a dogsled twice, and that they only have four months to prepare. Bifelt’s previous lack of exposure speaks to a broken link in the chain of intergenerational wisdom��transfer. “In the schools these days, they don’t really teach about our culture,” Bifelt says. “Back in the village, we’re losing a lot of knowledge, our stories, our history.”��

The film highlights this tragedy, playing out across villages in the Alaskan bush: the last generation of elders to grow up speaking their own language and living an approximation of the old ways are dying��and often��taking cultural knowledge to the grave. “Our culture was basically attacked when my grandparents were young,” says Bifelt. “Fast-forward to now,��I can’t speak my language fluently.” Bifelt knew that his great-uncle was a racer��but didn’t learn how dominant a champion he’d been until he was a teenager—up until then, Bifelt had been basketball obsessed, and his heroes were��LeBron James and Dwyane Wade. “In our culture, we don’t like to brag about ourselves,” he says. “I didn’t have too much experience with champions who were Native like me.”

The film does a good job of referencing all of this context, but there’s rarely time for any exposition, which is where we arrive at my chief complaint,��which is really more of a compliment: it should have been twice as long. Attla’s life is too interesting��and touches on too many important issues in both Alaskan history and the��present that��go unexplored at��its 55-minute run time. For an audience��who��may not know much about Alaskan history, some additional explication might have helped.��

In the end, the old man, who Bifelt calls Grandpa, does all he can to coach his grandnephew along.��There��are things about raising and training dogs that surely transfer, but these scenes reminded me of that old adage, that the best players don’t always make the best coaches. The thing that drove Attla��so hard to win—the fuel for his fire—can’t be taught, certainly not in such a short time. “You have to race like your life depends on it, like you’re hungry,” he tells Bifelt at one point. “At least that’s the way I used to think.”��

Attla does not live long enough to see Bifelt compete in the race they’d been training for, landing in the ICU of an Anchorage hospital a few weeks before race day. “I’m proud of you, proud of you for wanting to learn from Grandpa,” he tells Bifelt from his hospital bed. “I know you need a lot more answers, but Grandpa is gonna die. I didn’t last as long as I thought I would.”

Not long after Attla’s funeral, Bifelt��steps��up to the starting line of the Open North American, wearing the aviator sunglasses and headband that were Attla’s signature look. We won’t spoil the outcome, but it’s safe to say that Bifelt��has proven himself a true student, bighearted, observant, and respectful. Which is why it’s so lovely to see him, at the��film’s end, having decided to pursue a teaching degree and already engaged in��mentoring the young mushers who he hopes will come up behind him. In his case, winning means mending the link in that broken chain, passing along this family tradition, and preserving one small corner of a culture that has been marginalized for too long.

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‘The Sun Is a Compass’ Is an Engaging Look at ��ԹϺ��

mlaplante — Sun, 05 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Early in her memoir ($15; Little, Brown Spark), ornithologist introduces readers to one of those wonderful German words with no English equivalent that expresses a sentiment so perfectly you want to print it on a T-shirt. Zugunruhe, meaning “migratory restlessness,”��is usually attributed to birds in the springtime. “For birds, the urge to move can’t be contained,” writes Van Hemert. After an early career spent at remote field camps, the homegrown Alaskan found herself office-bound, nearing the completion of her Ph.D.��and staring down a series of big life questions about what comes next. She knew from her own past experience that sometimes movement is the best way to think things through. “I had Zugunruhe in a big way,” she writes. ��

Van Hemert’s solution was to��undertake an adventure on the scale of an avian migration: a 4,000-mile, self-powered journey by rowboat, foot, skis, pack raft, and even a little swimming, from Bellingham, Washington, to Kotzebue, Alaska, by way of the , the Yukon, the Arctic coast, and the Brooks Range. The voyage took Van Hemert and her husband, Pat Farrell, six months to complete. What happened in between is recounted beautifully in The Sun Is a Compass, published earlier this spring. The book is a gripping tale of hardships endured and natural wonders encountered��but also something more: a coming-of-age journey and a search for answers to the big life��questions that dog us all, no matter what form our restlessness takes.

Van Hemert was raised by parents who summited Denali together before she was born and who later indoctrinated her and her siblings in climbing, skiing, camping, and hiking. “For my parents, the outdoors offered a version of church that provided clarity without demanding a particular form of allegiance,” she writes. Van Hemert and Farrell, himself an avid climber and outdoorsman from upstate New York, worship at the same altar. Farrell made his way to Alaska at 19, walked into a spruce forest, and hand-built a log cabin that he then lived in for a year before going to art school in Bellingham, where he and Van Hemert met. She soon went back with him to visit the cabin and came away impressed. They��embarked on their first big adventure together in 2002, when they were dropped off at the head of a river in Canada’s Northwest Territories with tools,��but no boat, and built a spruce-bark canoe nicknamed Sprucey that they paddled 300 miles. Other adventures followed, including marriage and constructing��a stunning off-the-grid cabin together on a remote beach near Haines, Alaska. “Wilderness,” she writes, “has become the silent third partner in our marriage.”

Van Hemert’s husband, Pat Farrell (Courtesy of Caroline Van Hemert and Patrick Farrell)

But by 2011, they were living a relatively sedentary life in Anchorage, where Farrell was building custom homes and Van Hemert, then 33, was finishing her Ph.D. on . She found that, like many a field scientist shackled to a desk before her, she wasn’t sure she wanted an academic career. Add to that two deaths of people close to her, her father’s diagnosis with early-stage Parkinson’s disease, and the looming question of whether to have children, and it’s no wonder she began pining for “the solitude and silence of the river, the sure purpose of each day.” And it was, it seemed to them, now or never. “We knew our bodies wouldn’t stay strong forever,” Van Hemert writes. “Inevitably, our responsibilities would grow; our freedom would shrink.”

Their route follows one they’d sketched out in theory years earlier and called, grandly, the Trans North America.��They were already an accomplished adventure duo, but this trip would require all the toughness and resourcefulness they could muster, from the logistics, route planning, and packing to the actual travel through infrequently visited and��sometimes unmapped areas, stacking high-mileage days one after another for half a year. The trip starts with one major hurdle, considering their goal of rowing the Inside Passage: “In all of our frantic preparations for the trip, we had neglected perhaps the most important one of all—learning to row.”

But in that, as in everything else, they found a way forward. The tale skips along, as they stop over at their cabin near Haines before continuing up and over the Coast Range on skis and foot, dropping down into the headwaters of the Yukon, floating down it, crossing the Tombstone Mountains, and getting ravaged by mosquitoes in the McKenzie River delta before emerging on the Arctic coast. They walk and paddle the coast, eventually turn south, cross the Brooks Range, and paddle the length of the Noatak River before arriving in Kotzebue.

Van Hemert and Farrell’s cabin in Haines, Alaska (Courtesy of Caroline Van Hemert and Patrick Farrell)

There is no shortage of hardship or frightening moments, including a confrontation with a black bear that leaves them badly shaken—“I’m discovering what it means to be hunted,” she writes—and a dicey swim��to cross a swollen river that she recounts in the book’s opening. Van Hemert is candid about the errors in decision-making that can afflict even experienced adventurers. “It takes only half an hour for us to realize we have made a mistake,” she writes, in one of the many uh-oh��passages. In this instance, they’ve underestimated the fickle temper of the Arctic Ocean’s near shore shallows��and overestimated their pack rafts’ seaworthiness. As the waves build, they struggle to stay afloat, and she glances over at Farrell as he’s hit by a succession of big waves. “Then he topples into the icy sea,” she writes. “As he goes under, I feel the air leave my lungs. All I can see now is the bottom of his raft.” They make it to land, struggle out of wet clothes, and warm up, but Van Hemert is left wondering, “What if?”��

Through it all, they persevere. “No matter how ugly,” she writes, “what I see in front of me is the only way forward.” It is a testament to their resiliency that they keep putting one foot in front of the other, for which they are rewarded with front-row seats to sublime��moments.��After enduring near starvation due to a delayed food drop, they end up perfectly timed to intersect with a caribou migration, hiding in a stand of willows while thousands of the reindeer��stream by toward��a river crossing. “‘This is the single most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,’ Pat mouths to me,” she writes.

Van Hemert in a pack raft in the Arctic (Courtesy of Caroline Van Hemert and Patrick Farrell)

The bookshelf of Alaskan adventure tomes is long and distinguished, groaning beneath the weight of so many journeys taken and lessons learned. Van Hemert belongs on the shelf for sheer audacity of vision alone, and while her book doesn’t approach the heights reached by the masters, she writes engagingly and is an able guide, shifting between scientist and human, head and heart, reason and emotion. As a scientist, she writes especially well on the fascinating secret lives of birds, about which she’s able to teach us a great deal without losing the thread of her story. There are clichés and science-teacher pedantism—“our watery blue earth is a small piece of something much larger than we will ever comprehend”—but such moments are relatively few.

While narrating the journey, the writing around her interactions with others is particularly wooden early on. The people they meet��along the way, and even her husband, are stick-figures who are no more than signposts on her solipsistic quest. But as the book rolls along and gains momentum, those early hiccups recede and her intention clarifies. She seems to understand something new about the story she’s writing, which is really about two people on the cusp of adulthood taking a journey with each other, and within themselves, toward��some greater depth of relationship. It’s about moving from concern with self to concern for others,��from narrowly focused definitions of what a successful life looks like to a broader understanding of its unpredictability and beauty. It’s about the paramount importance of both seeking out personal challenges and surrounding ourselves with people who enable our best impulses and curb our worst. By the end, Van Hemert realizes that��“this journey is as much about human connections as it is about wilderness.”

As they near the completion of their voyage, Van Hemert nails the preemptive nostalgia that often arrives as you close in on some long-sought goal: the impulse to take just one more photo, savor just one more sunset, live one more moment of focused bliss before returning to the splintered consciousness of our daily lives. Eight miles from their adventure’s end in Kotzebue, they decide to camp one last night, even though they could make town easily. “Suddenly I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to arrive. I want to stay put, waiting here with the swans,” she writes. In those moments, memory of the suffering evaporates, leaving what you’ve sought all along—clarity.��The next question is:��How do you bring those lessons back with you, to the routines that threaten to swamp even the best of intentions?��One finishes the book suspecting that, for Van Hemert and Farrell, adulthood and children��might change the tenor of the adventures, but won’t stop them.

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‘Hostile Planet’ Takes a Candid Look at Climate Change

jversteegh — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Early in the first episode of , an ambitious six-part nature series that will premiere tonight on National Geographic, viewers are introduced to a pair of barnacle geese and their trio of fuzzy chicks. The chicks��happened to have been hatched��atop a remote rock spire in Greenland, in a nest made in haste as their parents adapted to an early spring that disrupted their typical migration and nesting patterns. Unfortunately for the as-yet flightless goslings, food and water are on the valley floor��some 400 feet below their aerie. It’s a long, perilous drop, and predators await. Cue shot of a hungry fox.

“If the chicks don’t feed within 36 hours, they’ll starve, [but] these chicks won’t be able to fly for another month,” says host and narrator Bear Grylls,��his voice familiar though not exactly comforting. “There is a solution, just not an easy one.” And then, as dramatic music kicks in, the chicks begin their seemingly suicidal plunges, flapping their useless winglets as they fall. It’s not giving away too much for a series with “hostile” in the title to reveal that not all the youngsters make it—in that scene and��many others. “With the seasons increasingly unpredictable, fewer chicks will survive,” Grylls narrates. “A changing climate is affecting life in mountains across the world.”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=QkUmyFripgQ

The series is stunningly beautiful, but also not shy about highlighting the Darwinian harshness that comes��with that beauty. The natural world here is awe-inspiring, yes, but far from benign; it’s less “mother nature” and more “nature is a motherfucker.” “We didn’t try to sweeten the story or put more hope into it than there is—we wanted it to show people the reality,” says executive producer Tom Hugh-Jones, an Emmy-winning veteran of the BBC Natural History Unit who worked on both Planet Earth and Planet Earth II. In Hostile Planet, he saw a chance to make the nature documentary’s next evolution, utilizing every aspect of filmmaking, from the soundtrack to the editing to the cutting-edge camerawork, in order to move beyond the somewhat more prim David Attenborough format and tell a more urgent story. (Coincidentally, Netflix is also releasing a climate-change-focused nature documentary this week, , narrated by Attenborough.) “We wanted to make something that was more current, both in the way we told the story and the way we addressed the situation that we are all facing on this planet.”

Hostile Planet interweaves stories from across the seven continents, grouping them together thematically in each episode by type of ecosystem—mountains, oceans, grasslands, jungles, deserts, polar—many featuring animals struggling with new uncertainty. They are adapted evolutionarily to a certain set of expectations about when the seasons will change and��when the storms will arrive, about when they should begin a migration and what other animals they can expect to find at their journey’s end. Increasing unpredictability, however, undermines those assumptions, which can have dire results. “The aspiration is to show how the animals are managing to cope in such a fast-changing world,” Grylls told me. “Life is hard on the edge for animals anyway, but the edge is just getting harder and sharper because of what’s happening with climate change and weather extremes.” The planet is changing. Animals are adapting where they can, dying where they can’t.

This unsparing approach diverges from other nature documentaries that tend to focus on pure entertainment and heartwarming moments. There are cute animals aplenty, but as often as not, their vulnerability signals that they’re destined to end up on the menu��while their distraught parents look on helplessly. And while all your favorite charismatic megafauna make an appearance, their charisma isn’t the point; their toughness is. Even the trivia, as prevalent here as in any other entry in the genre, comes mostly in service of the larger story. Elephants facing drought might have to walk 100 miles daily to forage for increasingly scarce food. Bison can lose a quart of blood per day to abnormally large populations of biting black flies. Polar bears need to eat a seal every 12 days, and some are experimenting with hunting belugas now that sketchy pack ice makes seal hunting more difficult. The temperature in the Himalayas is rising a degree every decade on average, which makes the snow leopard’s thick fur a less beneficial adaptation.

As you might imagine, getting this footage was not easy, and the scope of the project was immense. Film crews travelled to all seven continents over a period of three years and 1,300 individual filming days to get sequences as stunning as any in Planet Earth. The team spent a month in the Sahara stalking the notoriously camera-shy fennec fox, which yielded only a few minutes of footage in the finished production. But what footage: saucer-eared foxes peeking out of their burrow at night, followed by two pups, playing and tumbling in the desert sand. Elsewhere in the series, a pack of arctic wolves take��down a muskox; hummingbirds joust with their beaks while hovering in mid-air; and a snow leopard bounds down a cliff and pounces on a Himalayan blue sheep.

‘Hostile Planet’ host and narrator Bear Grylls (National Geographic/Johannes Du Toit/African Photo Productions)

The team needed both luck and dedication—the former��to find the animals and the latter to stick around long enough to be there while they did something interesting. They also, like the animals, had to overcome obstacles posed by a changing climate. “We had to take into account that maybe we couldn’t rely on normal historical weather patterns for��when it will flood here or freeze there,” says Hugh-Jones. “It adds a whole other level of complexity these days, as things that used to happen like clockwork are now totally unpredictable.”

The show is not all about the scene-stealers. Oscar-winning cinematographer Guillermo Navarro embraced every new technology at his disposal (including high-frame-rate slow motion, incredible time-lapse sequences, and bird-POV footage shot by a racing drone pilot)��to create not just awe but also intimacy. “It’s about using all these tools to go beyond the formula, to change the way the story is told,” Navarro told me. “And part of that is feeling a closeness, a full immersion in the story.” The snow leopard sequence was a particular highlight for Navarro, because witnessing such a hunt is so rare. “These are not actors, so all you can do is be present and patient and bring back a story that hopefully will make people care.”

Though at times it can be a touch heavy-handed, the show mostly succeeds in not being overly didactic about the threats to species around the world. Hostile Planet tweaks the nature-documentary formula by situating its stories in both their local context and in relation to the larger threat of a changing planet. In doing so, the filmmakers are��hoping to attract a broader—and younger—audience��for whom��climate change is a real and terrifying part of the��future. And while it can be grim, it nonetheless makes for captivating and awe-inspiring viewing.

And there are more than a few lessons to take away from the show. Most of the time, the animals who band together adapt most successfully, be it the family of meerkats chasing off a cobra��or the thousands of penguin fathers huddled together for warmth, each cradling a solitary egg at his feet. Not every act of collective defense is a success, but the overall message is unmistakable: the best chance of surviving what’s to come is by working together.

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‘The Last Whalers’ Illuminates a Dying Way of Life

lwhelan — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In a tiny village on the flanks of a jungle-blanketed volcano on a remote island in far-eastern Indonesia, a call goes out. A sperm whale has been sighted. Hundreds of men race to the beach, find their clansmen, and paddle out into the Savu Sea in small, hand-hewn wooden boats. On a raised platform attached to the bow stands a lone figure scanning the horizon: the lamafa (harpooner). Once the motorless boat is maneuvered to within striking distance of the whale, the lamafa launches himself from the platform, driving the harpoon in with his body weight before swimming back to the boat, which is now tethered to the leviathan. As it runs and dives and resurfaces, the whale is pricked with harpoon after harpoon in a highly choreographed sequence, and the Lilliputian fleet is dragged for miles. If the hunt is successful, the whale expires and the boats unfurl palm-leaf sails and tow it back to shore. It is butchered on the beach, and thanks are given to the ancestors before its flesh is divided among villagers in a manner proscribed by hierarchy and tradition.

It all sounds like a fantasy, something more out of the 18th century than the 21st, and yet this was what Doug Bock Clark encountered in 2011 when he first visited the village of Lamalera, on the south coast of the Indonesian island of Lembata. Clark, a widely published magazine journalist, was finishing a yearlong Fulbright fellowship on a nearby island when he went to see the Lamalerans for the first time. They are widely thought to be the last purely subsistence whalers on earth, and the place exerted a powerful pull on him. From 2014 to 2018, he returned seven times, spending in total over a year on the island learning their language, observing their hunts, and becoming enmeshed in village life. The result is his forceful debut book ($30, Little, Brown and Company), which follows a cast of Lamalerans as they navigate the tension between a world governed by their own traditional “Ways of the Ancestors” and the strange new notions of “progress” lapping up on their shore. Clark’s finely wrought, deeply reported, and highly empathetic account is a human-level testament to dignity in the face of loss and a stoic adherence to cultural inheritance in the face of a rapidly changing world. It forces us to reckon with the question of what stands to be lost as the tide of modernity sweeps over the last redoubts of hunter-gatherers like the Lamalerans.

And what hope, then, do these whalers have of resisting the onslaught? “There is a saying in Lamalera,” Clark tells us. “Preme ki, ‘Hope, but not too much,’ reflecting the belief that the whales would never come if the people demanded them.”

(Courtesy Little, Brown and Company)

The Lamalerans’ hunting is allowed under , so long as they are consuming rather than selling their catch. For the 1,500 Lamalerans, the roughly 20 sperm whales they take on average annually are a dietary necessity. The poor soil and lack of flat areas in their small territory make agriculture impossible. They rely on what they can take from the sea, including fish, rays, dolphins, and sharks. But sperm whales still form the protein bedrock of their diet as well as their most valuable commodity for bartering for corn and other necessities with nearby mountain tribes. It’s a hardscrabble life, and a poor fishing season can leave a family, or even the entire village, on the brink of famine. It is for this reason, Clark writes, that they are “one of the most generous societies in the world,” with portions of each whale reserved to be handed out to members of clans or families who have not had a successful hunt, a sort of ritualized social-welfare program that assures nobody starves.

Given their reliance on the whales, it is no surprise that their entire culture and belief system is oriented toward the hunt. Their cosmology is built around the seasonal return of whales: shamanistic rituals are designed to guarantee a good hunt, and every gust of wind has a potential message about the whales, delivered by the omnipresent spirits of the ancestors. The hunt itself has a vocabulary so specific that it brings to mind that old (and debunked) cliché about the number of words the Eskimo have for snow. The specificity serves a purpose, allowing whalers “to compress paragraphs of information about the hunt into a few syllables,” Clark writes. “More than that, though, they were also linguistic microcosms of a whole way of life, and will be among the first words to vanish if the Lamalerans’ culture weakens.”

That “if” may be more of a “when.” Already the old whaling songs go unsung and are forgotten. A diesel generator is installed and the tribe’s whale-oil lamps begin to rust. A gong formerly used to call together traditional gatherings corrodes and cracks. A banner featuring the face of a congressional candidate is repurposed as a sail, displacing traditionally woven, labor-intensive palm-leaf sails. Television arrives, then a road, a port, cell-phone towers. An electric drill is used to rebuild a traditional ship, even as the rest of it is shaped by hand in accordance with the way such boats have been constructed for centuries. Clark writes of the aging whaler overseeing that reconstruction: “Frans had to accept that no amount of effort could resurrect the past or freeze the present. The only choice, then, was how much to evolve.”

Adaptation is not new to the Lamalerans. They themselves are immigrants who had to adjust to a new place when they arrived perhaps 500 years ago after an odyssey from their original home island somewhere to the east. Over the past century, their isolation has eroded, but their culture has proven pliable. They have integrated Catholicism, which arrived on the island in 1920, into their traditional animism, and they have incorporated new fishing techniques brought from overseas. Perhaps the biggest change began in the 1990s, when the tribe added a new type of vessel to its fleet of traditional paddle-and-sail-equipped whaleboats: small motorboats they called jonson after American-made Johnson outboards that were the first to reach the island. The motorboats, as Clark explains, were just a new tool, but the other, more crucial elements of the culture remained intact: the ethos, the pride, the deep sense of belonging, the boys who aspire to stand on the prow and harpoon a whale. But it is by such small accretions, perhaps, that larger things are lost. Some of the older whaling boats molder from disuse, “splattered with chicken poop and blotted with moss.”

Clark successfully depicts these people in their full human complexity rather than as primitive tropes.

Clark’s prose soars, sometimes a little too high—things evanesce, sunsets fume, the stars are a heavenly chandelier—but that’s a small quibble. There are just as many lovely turns of phrase, like the “bricks of flesh” that pile up as a whale carcass is flensed. Furthermore, Clark’s sympathy for and devotion to his subjects is real: he speaks both Indonesian and Lamaleran and fosters an intimacy that allows him to disappear entirely in the telling of their story. He brings us into his characters’ lives, showing us the rhythms of Lamalera and the day-to-day tensions the villagers face: the apprentice whaler who likes texting with girls and thinks about moving to Jakarta to pursue an easier life; the young woman who moves back to the village after graduating from university, only to wonder whether she can see a life for herself there; the aging harpooner who doesn’t know if his sons will be able to follow in his footsteps. Clark sees in them, possibly, an element of the cure for our corrosive modern times. “The worst forms of modernity look a lot like an addiction, and perhaps the Ways of the Ancestors are an antidote,” he writes. “Their great heroism is that they are striving, despite overwhelming odds, to control the process that has hijacked all of humanity.”

Heroic though it may be, such an outlook toes the line of romanticism. For the most part, Clark successfully depicts these people in their full human complexity rather than as primitive tropes. But he tends to favor the traditional over the modern, as when, in speaking of a clan that was wealthy enough to send its children to school before the others, he can’t help but lament that “their future harpooners became paper pushers.” His sympathetic view also glosses over certain less savory aspects of the village’s traditional way of life: the capriciousness and grinding poverty of the subsistence lifestyle, the rampant drinking and smoking, the curtailed life expectancy, and, more recently, the alleged trafficking of wildlife parts to the lucrative Chinese market.

Whaling—including subsistence whaling by indigenous groups—is a fraught subject and under various threats, and there are times as a reader where you’re left wanting Clark to zoom out and offer a bit more on the broader context. ��ԹϺ��r fishermen, for example, have begun arriving in greater numbers in the Savu Sea, enticed by global markets in places like Japan and China, and Lamalerans report diminished catches of rays and sharks, perhaps due to overfishing. With the road, new port, and better cell-phone coverage, the village has begun to attract more visitors and even started appearing on websites for adventurous travelers.

Lamalera has also attracted the unwanted attention of conservation groups. In 2017, for example, the Nature Conservancy began working with the Indonesian government , arguing that the introduction of motorboats meant the Lamalerans had already given up their traditional culture. There is a dark irony here, that having escaped colonialism for five centuries, the Lamalerans could be forced to lay down their harpoons by the neocolonial effects of conservation. “For the Lamalerans, the very idea of conservation is foreign,” writes Clark, and they’re not wrong to be dubious. “History has shown time and again that depriving indigenous people of their livelihoods often leads directly to their end, as they lose their identities within a generation.”

The Lamalerans are left wondering whether their hard-won knowledge and remarkable skill set, crafted over centuries and handed down over generations, have any value in this new world. They retain their dignity, but it is increasingly tinged with a fatalistic sadness. The lamafa is a revered figure among the tribe, but an aging whaler wonders what those skills might be worth in this modern world. For “no matter how great a lamafa he was, he still lacked the ability to provide for [his family] in a changing world, where his skill with a harpoon was of diminishing importance.”

But the problem is more than a matter of retraining and retooling; it is existential, a question of cultural survival. Or as Clark puts it, “After all, who are whalers who do not whale?”

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Reality Is Fantasy in ‘The Last Wild Men of Borneo’

jversteegh — Wed, 07 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The island of Borneo has long conjured powerful Western fantasies of the exotic—a place of steep mountains, impenetrable forests, and Stone Age tribes. A place where spirits lurk, and where men can simply vanish. It’s proven to be the perfect backdrop on which to project romantic notions about Rousseau’s natural man and the noble savage, as well as an irresistible beacon to those seeking to leave modern life behind.

In , out March 6, journalist Carl Hoffman recounts the lives of two Westerners who heeded the island’s siren song in the 1970s and 1980s, whose lives were defined by the island, and who in turn helped define the island to the outside world.

The first, Swiss Bruno Manser, lived among the nomadic Penan for the better part of a decade, becoming as close to being a member of the tribe as a white man ever has, eventually organizing them against the logging companies decimating their home forests and becoming an icon of the international conservation movement before disappearing without a trace in 2000. The second, American tribal-art dealer Michael Palmieri, left California on the hippie trail, bouncing from Mexico to India to Nepal to Afghanistan, learning the smuggling and black-market game along the way, before alighting in the paradise of prelapsarian Bali. Once there, he began exploring the most remote parts of Borneo, acquiring pieces of tribal art that now reside in museums and private collections around the world.

Hoffman is himself an accomplished wanderer. His previous book, , investigated the disappearance of another Westerner gone native (Michael Rockefeller) on an enchanted isle (New Guinea). As such, he brings a level of understanding and empathy, as well as a whole lot of dogged shoe-leather reporting, from commissioning translations of Manser’s journals and letters to spending weeks traversing Borneo with Palmieri and further weeks in the jungle with the Penan themselves. The end result is partly a twin biography of these two men, partly a sociological and historical account of Borneo, and partly a first-rate adventure story. It’s a lot of ground to cover, and the toggling between the men’s stories doesn’t always work seamlessly, but in the end it adds up to a compelling, readable book. (Disclosure: Hoffman and I are professional acquaintances, and I was thanked in the acknowledgements section of Savage Harvest for some limited advice I offered on traveling in the region.)

Initially, Manser and Palmieri appear to be complete opposites. The ascetic Manser, after conscientiously objecting to military service, left his Basel home and spent a dozen years high in the Alps as a shepherd, living in a shack without modern conveniences, sewing his own clothes, and giving himself a full practical education in pastoral self-sufficiency, all while undertaking ever more daring explorations of peaks and caves in the surrounding area and beyond. When Manser saw a picture of a Penan tribesman in a library book, a fuse was lit: here was a people living in harmony with the forest, drawing all they needed from it, fully apart from the materialism of the Western world. In 1984, after inviting himself on a British caving expedition in Borneo, Manser walked off into the jungle to find the Penan and didn’t look back. He learned the language, adopted their manner of dress—loincloth, rattan bracelets, and a curious mullet-style haircut—and became adept at hunting. Before long, he had fully integrated into Penan life.

That’s part of the magic of this book: that in the hazy equatorial air of such a wild place, peopled by such outsized characters, anything was possible, or at least many things were.

Manser, Hoffman writes, “had a purity, a recklessness that attracted people,” a gift for inspiring others to join his cause, and he was soon helping organize Penan anti-logging efforts, mostly in the form of human-chain roadblocks across the newly cut dirt roads. The timber interests and their government sponsors were not amused, and he was soon a wanted man with a price on his head. Manser evaded arrest, and gunfire, twice, spending years hidden in the jungle by the Penan, before finally escaping and returning to Switzerland in 1990, where he began rallying greater international attention to the cause of Borneo’s deforestation and set up the Bruno Manser Fund. He became the (white) face of the cause, and as his celebrity grew, there was no shortage of acolytes and profiles. In 1991, Manser was named “��ԹϺ��r of the Year” by this magazine for his conservation work.

Palmieri, by contrast, was a proto-hippie, a movie-star handsome California surfer who headed south from Mexico in the early years of the Vietnam War to dodge the draft and ended up moving from Paris to Goa to Kathmandu to Kabul, trafficking in various goods along the way. He was a naturally gregarious force of nature and made friends by the dozen wherever he went, among them the Afghan crown prince Shah Mahmood Khan, who, Palmieri claims, engaged him to smuggle the crown jewels out of the country to Europe as the royal family fell out of favor. (In a classic hustle, he preferred to return to Kabul each time overland, driving a newly purchased Mercedes, which the prince helped him sell for a tidy profit on arrival.)

Finally, he arrived in Borneo and began collecting rattan baskets from the Dayak people of the upper Mahakam River and elsewhere. He sold them quickly to the other hippies then beginning to flow into Bali and began returning to Borneo frequently, quickly working his way up to bigger objects and increasingly daring adventures. He soon became a regular presence in the longhouses up and down the region’s rivers, hustling, cajoling, and buying items that were increasingly valuable in the booming market for “primitive art.” Palmieri would become one of the world’s foremost dealers of such art, spending his life in the ethical gray area that such objects often inhabit. As Hoffman writes, “All tribal art is sacred art.”

The lives of Palmieri and Manser intersected just once, in an open-air café in Kuching, Sarawak’s capital city. It was 1999, just a year before Manser disappeared. “There was a guy sitting at one of the tables alone…A little guy with funny glasses,” Palmieri told Hoffman, while sitting with him at the same café. He didn’t know it was Manser until afterward, and though initially he was standoffish, Palmieri broke the ice. “It was nothing, really. We didn’t say anything profound. Just shot the shit. Two travelers out there in the world.” The account has a bit of the pixie dust of many of Palmieri’s tales—could such a meet-cute really have happened?—but then that’s part of the magic of this book: that in the hazy equatorial air of a place peopled by such outsized characters, anything was possible, or at least many things were.

The yin and yang aspect of this pairing is obvious—the idealist and the buccaneer, the monk and the hedonist, the ascetic and the capitalist, one focused on going in, the other on bringing things out. Manser is described early in the book by his best friend as “a collector of experiences” rather than things, and Palmieri was the consummate collector of things. But of course it’s not that simple—nothing in Borneo, it seems, ever is—and the odd coupling is sort of the point: in the end, though they viewed the world through different lenses, a similar impulse drove them both.

“They had sprung from a group, a tribe, that they didn’t feel a part of any longer,” Hoffman writes, and their search for a place where they belonged led them both to the mythical island of Borneo, with all of its spiritual power and complications. (One other thing the two men had in common, and which helps the book immensely, is ego: neither of them was shy about documenting and discussing their exploits.)

At times, as Hoffman bounces back and forth between the two stories, the reader will be left wanting more of one or the other, or perhaps even wishing the entire book was focused on just one of them. But the pairing yields surprises and a number of insights, many sprung from the fact that both Manser and Palmieri arrived in Borneo at what Hoffman rightly calls a “pivotal moment.”

“Modernity was creeping upriver” in the form of Christian missionaries, timber companies, and government officials bringing notions of “progress” that would gradually erode the very things that drew them there. Palmieri was in some ways a harbinger of the future, a realist who brought the market to Borneo’s prehistoric villages and has, despite the ethical murkiness of that market, helped preserve a part of a cultural legacy that might otherwise have been destroyed, burned, and forgotten. These pieces, Hoffman writes, are “physical manifestations of a lost world, a lost way of living.” (The ethics of that market, and the way those objects are viewed by museumgoers in places a world away, are fascinating subjects touched on briefly in the book.)

Manser, for all his organizing and proselytizing and sneaking in and out of Borneo throughout the 1990s, had been unable to stem the tide and grew increasingly despondent. The logging continued, and the Penan were still endangered, and he was still a white outsider. In the period before he disappeared in 2000, his friends tell Hoffman, Manser seemed to have lost all hope, so when he disappeared in the vicinity of a peak called Batu Lawi, in the Kelabit Highlands, those closest to Manser believe it was at least partly intentional. He’d gone too far, become a man with a foot in two worlds but a home in neither. It was six months before an extensive search was mounted, but by then it was too late. No trace of him was ever found. By the time Hoffman comes onto the scene, in 2016, the trail is even colder and cracking the Manser mystery isn’t even a remote possibility.

The yin and yang aspect of this pairing is obvious—the idealist and the buccaneer, the monk and the hedonist, the ascetic and the capitalist, one focused on going in, the other on bringing things out.

“The art of life is to grow old but not lose your beliefs as you do. Or, if you lose them, to find new ways to be glad to be alive,” says Georges Ruegg, one of Manser’s closest friends from his shepherding days. “But Bruno lost all his beliefs and he crashed. He couldn’t evolve, and that’s the tragedy.”

Palmieri was better able to roll with the punches. He remains in Bali, still trading in antiquities, still able to summon the old joviality and spin a fantastic story, though some of the magic seems to have gone out of it for him. Bali is choked with tribal-tattooed tourists seeking enlightenment through beachfront yoga, and the mountain jungles of Borneo are now mostly denuded, replanted with hundreds of thousands of acres of palm oil plantations. Hoffman accompanies Palmieri on a buying trip across Borneo, and it is hard not to be struck by the sadness of it all, by the futility of hunting for treasure in a world where it’s all been found, hauled out of the longhouses and the caves and the tombs by Palmieri and the legions of copycats who came in his wake. “We were combing through the wreckage of acculturation,” Hoffman writes of their journey, during which the primary use for Palmieri’s finely tuned eye was in plucking the few real pieces from the sea of increasingly crafty fakes.

But Palmieri is, in a way, as trapped by the parameters of his own outsized life story as Manser was. He, too, straddles a line between worlds. He watches American college football on satellite TV, but he hasn’t been American for a long time. He’s a refugee both geographically and temporally, a man out of step with time. “You could never go back. Not in time, not in culture, not to your old home country where you hadn’t lived for any extended time in 50 years,” Hoffman writes of Palmieri. “But you could enjoy the ride, and I had to admire Michael’s stamina and his passion for life.”

It is in the book’s final section where the stories come together and Hoffman’s strengths really shine. He recounts his walkabout with one of the last Penan families still clinging to the nomadic way of life, moving through some of the same jungles Manser traversed, guided by the descendants of those whom Manser knew. This Penan family is a remnant, most of their fellow tribesmen long settled in longhouses and villages, with Christianity and satellite TV. But here was a glimpse of the forest dynamos Manser had lived among, a glimpse of the living poetry of their daily life, and also its hardships. “The Penan had nothing, but they had everything.” Though they and their territory are diminished, and their walk takes them across logging roads and into cellphone range, and they are confined to ever smaller quadrants of forest, the Penan are not an illusion. The way of life they show Hoffman offers some sense of what’s been lost and of what Manser and Palmieri found all those years ago.

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