Standing Strong for Rivers Everywhere

Anyone who has met me, would find it fairly easy to see that I consider myself an environmentalist. I try to live my life in a manner that reflects this mentality, and I hope that what I do with my writing does too. That being said, my project for this class is mirroring this and another part of who I am: an activist. In a world already dominated by man, the "natural" world is too often silenced. I feel an overwhelming obligation to try to be a voice of opposition to this marginalization-- a voice that raises awareness and fosters hope.

My motivation for writing this piece is very much correlated with this emotional attachment to the environment, and particularly a river I have grown to love, and vowed to protect, in southern Chilean Patagonia. The Baker river runs from the Argentine boarder through the 15th region of Chile, flooding its turquoise waters into the Pacific Ocean at the fjords of Tortel. I have traveled the length of this 190 kilometer river on foot, in an attempt to celebrate the untouched waters as they have existed for 1,000 of years, before I'm forced to commemorate them.

The complex and violent history of Chile has created an extensively privatized economy, meaning water rights and mineral rights are almost completely relinquished from national control. This includes the water rights to the Baker and Pascua Rivers, subjects to largest wattage-producing dam proposal in history. The rights are held by international energy conglomerate HidroAysen, an Italian-owned and Spanish-run company. Production of the mega-dams is currently on hold, but for how long?

During my time in Chile, I saw how little influence the Chilean people had over their own environment, even in cases when more than 80 percent of the national population was openly in opposition to the dam system. Despite being a foreigner, I felt the need to speak out, to stand up to Goliath as he towered over David. What little I could do, I did: attending protests, writing and spreading information about hydropower, contacting the corporation at their headquarters to see the dam diagrams, and even attempting to translate HidroAysen's environmental impact report (the single copy I was able to find tucked away in the back room of library in Cochrane, Patagonia, nearly illegible and equally as convoluted of language). Though these actions were small in the grand scheme, they mattered to me and they mattered to the river and its ecosystem.

The Baker's water runs through the wildest place left on Earth. The river was here long, long before us, and knows her banks and the creatures who call them home more intimately than I can ever hope to understand another living being. But the fight doesn't stop with the Baker; there are more rivers and endless greed and not enough voices.

Due to recently passed legislation, Montana has the potential to find itself in a similarly dam-ridden situation. If my heart is anywhere but Chile, it is in the sultry afternoon breeze hoovering over a Montana riverbed, and churning deeply in the rapids of our own wild rivers. And now, our state's rivers are at stake.

In December of this last year, the Heritage Act was passed as a rider on the $585-billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The act designates new wilderness areas in Montana for the first time in 30 years. But it does not come without a cost. The new law also amends Montana water rights, allowing private sector mining and logging companies more access to public lands and the rivers that run through them. In addition, according to the Great Falls Tribune's overview of the NDAA, the attached Bureau of Reclamation Conduit Hydropower Development Equity and Jobs Act removes what lawmakers call "outdated federal statutes that currently prevent irrigation districts in Montana and other western states from developing hydopower on Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) canals, ditches, and conduits—four of which are in Montana." This means more dams, and less regulation. If you don't give a damn about rivers, give a damn the corresponding inundation of towns and ranches that exist along their banks. Or the trout. Care about the trout, or the 100's of other species whose migrational patterns will be forced to change as they return to increasingly drier and more mechanized rivers each year.

Look at me, I've gone off on a rant. As far as writing a piece like this, I find it important to try not to focus on me. Because who should care about what I have done, or have to say? I've already convinced myself- and clearly, I know what I believe- so now my approach to this piece is to convince others to oppose hydropower and be more aware of legislation that may promote it, and global water rights issues in general as our growing population continues to demand more consumption of natural resources. I think I can do that most effectively if I do share my own emotion, but through a more professionally-oriented and filtered voice.

I want to try to challenge myself as a writer to break away from approaching my work in the same manner, and I think it's important to try to strengthen myself in areas where I feel I am weak or less practiced as a writer, so I plan to grow my journalistic voice. The goal is to keep a few more readers (by not sounding like a stoned hippie) and have a chance at persuading them to see a side with which they aren't naturally inclined to agree. If I can do that, I will feel that my work has been done.
For now, at least.

Content Access

Here you can access my folder for the class and view a proposal for the capstone project.

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B5UbOf5H-QkoMk1ucy1OX196QUU&usp=sharing

Introduction

There were only a few unfamiliar faces in class so far, so I will make my introduction brief. I'm Lea, a hopeless liberal with a rather incredulous level of expectation. I hope that all of you, in your own way, take writing as seriously as I do. I think this is important for several reasons: we grow from working with one another, and we excel in a field that gives us the opportunity to be heard. In a world nearing nine billion, this is becoming increasingly rare.

There are a few things that I have fallen in love with in my short years on this planet, so you should be prepared to hear a lot about them, since I aim to write about what I love. In order of importance they are as follows:

1. Nature / place (though the eco-critic in me cringes at the use of that word)-- more specifically, the dry and arid red rock desert where two rivers converge as lifelines in a wasteland, the 15th region of southern Chilean Patagonia where you find the banks of the Baker river, and the Crazy Mountains that form the boundaries of the valley that we call home. These places, to me, are sacred and deserve to remain unchanged. I hope in my writing to do more than pay tribute to these incredible places: I hope to preserve their small moments in a way that allows them to exist in the mind of a reader who has never dipped their hand into turquoise water and felt the heartbeat of an ancient ecosystem flood the spaces left barren by urbanism. I hope to spread love and stewardship for the Earth.

2. Water -- I have harbored an obsession with rivers and water rights, built on my experiences in Chile in opposition to a series of hydroelectric megadams on the two most ancestral rivers in the country. Water privatization is a dirty and slippery business, and often it creates a David-vs-Goliath situation. I am curious recently about Montana water rights, and the distribution of use when it comes to "public" access.

The Baker River, Southern Chilean Patagonia, Region XI-- My favorite spot 

3. Travel -- Seeing new places and exploring the unknown canyons and mountaintops of this planet is a passion I'll never be able to fully satiate. I make an honest effort to travel somewhere new as often as possible, both as a learning experience and as a reminder that my world is not a constant. Upcoming trips include Japan and Norway.

Recently characterized by my editor as verbose but styled, a goal of mine this semester is to sharpen and tighten my prose. I want to work on Omitting Needless Words (thank you E.B. White) in an effort to control my tone, and create a work of writing that is professional, engaging and environmentally oriented. To do this, I know already I will have to rely heavily on all of your eyes and ears--I'll need critical views and harsh advice, red pens and copy-editing--to be able to draft something that speaks beyond my own belief and can help sway an audience to the losing side of the paradigm.

As you can tell, I try to emulate the kind of things I read. Call me a total nerd, but my favorite kind of writing, and the books that are spilling forth from my bookshelf as we speak, are the eco-criticism books I hoard whenever there's spare money in my bank account. Top picks include Timothy Morton (whose blog is well worth the read), Dana Philips, Terry Tempest Williams, Ed Abbey and Doug Peacock of the Monkey Wrench Gang, poet James Galvin, and even our very own Dr. Susan Kollin, who writes about the changes in the Alaskan wilderness. I have an unrelated obsession with Virginia Woolf and the modernism movement, mostly because I see a lot of parallels between the Modernist struggle and the circumstance from which it arose, and eco-crit. Since it is the newest of the revisionists in the world of literature, it is very much underrated and virtually unacknowledged outside the academic world. Someday I want to be a voice that helped propel it forward, and spur movement in the world around us from the shape of my phrases.
They say the difference between a dream and a goal is a plan... well, perfect timing.