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.
Cool! You've already begun convincing me (however, I was not on either side initially, but I am against people destroying the beauty of our world). I'm starting to understand the impact that hydropower can have on the environment (but I would like to know more about Montana). And I agree: the world is dominated by men, and some of them have huge egos and selfish mindsets. If you could convince that audience, you could change the world for sure.
ReplyDeleteYou've convinced me that your experiment is worth pursuing - your attempt to remove yourself from the piece, as it were - but I'll be on the fence about whether that's the sort of writer you ought to practice becoming. I think you're selling short the power of personal location in the writing.
ReplyDeleteAnother writer you might check out is Elizabeth Kolbert, who is the go-to writer for global warming in the New Yorker.