Tomorrow Amazon Watch will be holding a fundraising luncheon celebrating its fifteen years as a leader of innovative engagement in the Amazon rainforest environmental movement. This is naturally a time to remember successes, such as Amazon Watch’s participation in the lawsuit resulting in a historic $18 billion verdict against Chevron for dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into an area of pristine rainforest that is home to more than 30,000 people. It is also a time to look ahead to new challenges, such as the fight to stop the mammoth Belo Monte Dam project in Brazil, and to consider new ideas, such as Amazon Watch’s focus on alternative energy solutions for Brazil.
Today, however, the spotlight deservedly belongs to the extraordinary group of individuals who make up the Amazon Watch team. This exceptional crew pursues a dynamic three-pronged approach to protecting the rainforest. First, it works primarily through indigenous groups, helping them acquire the skills necessary to advocate effectively on behalf of the rainforest. Second, it engages in sophisticated corporate accountability strategies that are rendered all the more powerful by the participation of indigenous leaders. Third, it advocates for affordable clean energy alternatives that will alleviate the development pressures that are among the greatest threats to the rainforest. Multilingual, backcountry traveling, politically savvy, technologically astute humanists, the group that not only conceives, but executes such an agenda must be remarkable. And they are.
Over the past few months it has been my privilege to volunteer at Amazon Watch and to get to know its special mixture of sophistication, guts, and compassion, which is leavened with a down-to-earth sense of humor and heated with a passionate commitment to the planet. I’d like to share with you a few odds and ends I have picked up about this team because, in my experience, sometimes the odds and ends provide the most telling insights.
First off, this is a group of people engaged in the beauty and meaning of the world both inside and outside the office. Thomas, Amazon Watch’s Technical and Financial Manager, is also the Technical Director of the Project Bandaloop dance troop. Michelle, the development director, studied acting at Julliard and has numerous film credits to her name. Christian, Amazon Watch’s Brazil Campaigner, plays percussion for a local samba band, Fogo Na Roupe. Mitch, the Corporate Campaign Director, is a writer and a poet. Caroline, the Communications Director, is an award-winning photojournalist. Han, the Clean Up Ecuador Campaigner is a film producer for a small film company.
These folks feel deeply the stories of the people, communities, and beautiful places they serve and they know how to communicate their importance to the world at large. I believe that artistic souls make the best activists because the process of making art requires an essential optimism, a belief in something that inspires both celebration and ingenuity. Whatever else an activist organization offers the world, it must first offer hope for something worth the struggle to achieve. Even when they’re not telling a story, the staff at Amazon Watch offers this positive attitude in everything they do.
The staff at Amazon Watch is also extremely well-travelled and they have the harrowing and alternately hilarious stories to prove it. Sitting around the lunch table on any given day, one is likely to be very well entertained. The Donor Relations Manager, Jenny may be laughing about one of her milder traveling adventures coming down with Swine Flu in Rwanda and being kept in a hut under house arrest with a machine gun toting guard at the door until she recovered. Gregor then may tell of his own comic adventure on a recent trip to Peru when he fell on a fallen log covered with long, sharp spines in the rainforest. Fortunately, the spines were not, like many plants in the rainforest, poisonous. However, Gregor had to lie very still on the mud floor of a hut for several painful hours while a man from the indigenous community he was visiting attempted to remove one spine at a time without the benefit of tweezers. Although no tweezers could be found, Gregor saw the humor in being able to video the procedure on his smart phone. Mitch, mentioned above, first got involved in indigenous rights activism in Mexico where he focused attention on violence committed against Chiapas indigenous communities by the government’s military and police. When asked about the dangers of such work, Mitch responds, “Yes, I got in a little over my head….” Meanwhile, Han is honored to have been banned from China for his outspoken activism concerning Tibetan independence.
Many on the Amazon Watch staff acquired significant international experience as activists before coming to Amazon Watch. Christian, who is fluent in Portuguese, Spanish, French and English, worked for a year in Africa coordinating fair trade certification for qualifying producers and exporters. Caroline lived for several years in Ecuador and has circled the globe as a photojournalist covering social justice and environmental issues. Andrew worked for the Peace Brigades offering field protection to local human rights defenders in Colombia and has given civil society capacity-building trainings in such far flung destinations as Nepal and southern Sudan. Kevin, the Northern Amazon Coordinator, has lived in Ecuador for seven years working with indigenous and environmental NGOs on oil and gas issues. Jenny cofounded her own nonprofit, Groundwork Opportunities, and has travelled to 16 countries in Africa, Asia and Central America. After graduating from Green Corps, Leila, Amazon Watch’s Program Director, worked first as an organizer at Global Exchange, a human rights organization, and then as Rainforest Action Network’s Agribusiness Campaigner before coming to Amazon Watch where she has collectively more than twelve years experience traveling to South America and working on international campaigns.
Like Jenny, a number of other Amazon Watch team members have demonstrated a flare for leadership and creating solutions where important needs have gone unmet. While in college, Paul Burow, Amazon Watch’s Administrative and Finance Associate, cofounded a student-staffed think tank, the Roosevelt Institute, as a means of providing a response to Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution. As its National Field Director, Paul helped shepherd the growth of the Roosevelt Institute until it became a nationwide network of think tanks that eventually merged with the Roosevelt Institute run by the heirs of F.D.R. himself. Gregor, who has attained conversational ability in Nahua and basic Achuar, co-founded Shinai, a Peruvian non-profit that builds land rights capacity for indigenous communities in the Amazon. Caroline started a fair trade, fair story project Little Places, a marketplace for socially conscious goods and the underrepresented human rights and conservation stories of the regions they come from. Michelle sits on the board of the Indian Law Resource Center. Paul Paz y Miño, Amazon Watch’s Managing Director, is an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies and recently served on the board of Peace Brigades International USA. And of course, Atossa, Amazon Watch’s Executive Director, put her experience as Conservation Director of the City of Santa Monica and Campaign Director for the Rainforest Action Network to good use creating Amazon Watch, whose staff was recently named the Bay Area’s “Best Forest Guardians” by the SF Bay Guardian.
We’ve all heard the saying, “It takes a village to raise a child.” There’s something about the proportionality of that saying that is misleading with its measure of one child versus many adults. I think what this saying is really getting at is the value and power that a generous group of people can manifest when they come together in an open and purpose-driven way, whether the focus of that group be as small as one community’s children or as big as the entire Amazon rainforest basin.
The Amazon Watch team is a group of special people making an extraordinary difference to the life and lives of the Amazon rainforest. I encourage those who have the means to give generously to think seriously about making a significant donation in support of the integrity and skill with which Amazon Watch does its work. And if you can make it, consider attending the fundraising luncheon on the 27th to enjoy the opportunity to get to know Atossa, Paul, Leila, Michelle, Caroline, Thomas, Mitch, Paul, Kevin, Gregor, Andrew, Jenny, Christian and Han a little bit better. I know you’ll appreciate their many great qualities as much as I do. Together, we can build a platform for the next 15 years of Amazon Watch success.
