Hawaii, Ecotopia, Mongabay, Africa!

Pololu Point Lookout, Hawaii (the Big Island). Copyright (c) 2014 Wendee Nicole

Hello pumpkins! Soon I will post more photos and update about my week in Hawaii, where I visited my long time friend Elissa (who is a pilot for Mokulele airlines!) and traveled around Oahu and the Big Island (loved Volcanoes National Park!). The house I've lived in for the past decade, where I've raised my sweet children, goes on the market in a couple of days, and when my son goes off to University of Texas this fall, I am moving also, to .... AFRICA!! I am excited and nervous and melancholic all swirled into a bundle. But for the past several weeks, I have been prepping my house, landscaping, painting, fixing stuff (with the help of a dear guy friend - thank God for him!) and now the time has come. Houses are selling like hotcakes here, and I hope and pray it sells quickly and for what I am asking, as some of that money will be used to fund the nonprofit I've founded with a friend from Africa!

Check out our new website, which I designed, for the Redemption Song Foundation, and please "like" us on Facebook too! Our vision is "empowering youth through education, poverty alleviation, spiritual development and song" and we are accepting donations via the link on our website (or by check, but you have to send to me for now... I'm in the process of registering the "dba" and the other info for us before I move). We are providing school fees and basic necessities like food, clothing and hygiene /medical care information. We have plans for other exciting projects, like income-generating activities for older youth. One of the problems in the area is that the most impoverished girls and women can't afford menstrual pads, and they use leaves, dirty rags, etc, and we want to provide pads to these to girls, and create an income stream to those working on the pad project, making them using a cool machine made by an Indian entrepreneur (profiled on the BBC and in the new documentary, Menstrual Man). They often drop out of school when they start their periods. Some organizations provide hygiene packs to girls, but not everywhere - there is a big need. We will be starting an Indiegogo campaign to raise money for this soon.

I have had two more feature articles come out under my Mongabay Special Reporting Initiative Grant! Check them out:

• Tipping the scale: How a political economist could save the world’s forests

  
  “[T]here’s a five-letter word I’d like to repeat and repeat and repeat: Trust.” Thus spoke Elinor Ostrom in her 2009 Stockholm lecture, when at age 77 she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics. She’d spent a lifetime traveling the world and observing everyday citizens cooperating against all odds. Ostrom frequently encountered groups of people managing commonly shared resources, creating systems based on trust, such as peasant farmers in Nepal cooperatively managing simple irrigation systems, and people working to solve human-wildlife conflict with forest elephants in Kenya. Such collective behavior flew in the face of the longstanding theory of the day, which said that people will selfishly take whatever they can, ultimately causing a “tragedy of the commons.”

• Ecotopia emerging: Sustainable forests and healthy livelihoods go hand in hand

  
  Callenbach's 1975 utopian novel Ecotopia became wildly popular among environmental-leaning folks, hippies, and progressive thinkers of the day. The rebels who founded Ecotopia believed human health and livelihoods can coexist with nature, and built their nation For a book that has fallen mostly off the radar, outside of a smattering of college classes and small-scale environmental movements, certain aspects of Ecotopian society fall remarkably in line with research by Economics Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom, and more recently the work of Arun Agrawal, a scholar who studied under Ostrom. Research - described in this piece - discusses how decentralization of conservation policies and intrinsic motivations to preserve the environment are found in time-tested research, as well as the almost prophetic writings of Callenbach some 40 years before.

A green sea turtle we saw while snorkeling in Paradise Cove on Oahu. Copyright (c) 2014 Elissa Zavora. Love this image!! So cool! It was an amazing experience to swim next to the turtle, and another one showed up too! More to come. Love to you all!

I've been productive!

  The Habinyanja family group of mountain gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable Park, Uganda. Notice the green lips! I guess mountain gorillas like their lipstick green. :)  Photo Copyright (c) 2014 Wendee Nicole

Check out my first Mongabay blog post Reporter's Journal: The Forests of Uganda, posted today! I have pieces coming soon at Animal Planet Online, CBS Smartplanet.com, and Environmental Health Perspectives from my Uganda Adventures, but in the meantime several other articles on other topics have come out:

• Pig Poop Power: Scaling up waste-to-energy technology could transform the hog farming industry. Discover Magazine, Mar 2014. (the full article will not be online until May).


• BMW's Big Bet on Carbon Fiber. How carbon-fiber technology is transforming the auto industry, starting with the uber-cool BMW i-3! Solutions Journal (Rocky Mountain Institute). Spring 2014.


• A Question for Women's Health. Chemicals in Feminine Hygiene Products and Personal Lubricants (may not be safe...). Environmental Health Perspectives. PDF version. Mar 2014.

Mongabay Prize for Environmental Reporting!

Ferns in Oregon. Copyright © 2013 Wendee Nicole

I'm thrilled to announce that I was awarded the first Mongabay Prize for Environmental Reporting! You can read the announcement here: Prize exploring the next big idea in rainforest conservation announced

The prize sought proposals to explore the question of "What's the next big idea in tropical biodiversity conservation?". After a two-month application window and a month of deliberations, this week an independent panel of journalists, conservation practitioners, and tropical forest specialists selected environmental journalist Wendee Nicole as the first recipient of the Mongabay Prize for Environmental Reporting. 

Nicole's reporting will examine the wider topic of innovation in tropical biology conservation, with focus on polycentric governance in Uganda and Peru. Her work will center around the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom's theories of polycentric governance and decentralization: putting power in the hands of locals. Nicole will spend time in both countries, interviewing on-the-ground actors and looking at the struggle to combat poverty while preserving shared resources like forests and biodiversity. In the process, Nicole will produce a series of articles on what's working and what's not in the world of forest conservation.

The 6-month, $20,000 grant will allow me to travel to Uganda and Peru to report on projects that exemplify polycentric governance. Though that's a mouthful, it is a very important and exciting concept. Ever heard of the "tragedy of the commons" where people are thought to always act selfishly and therefore deplete a common patch of land, such as the classic example of livestock overgrazing? Ostrom reviewed myriad real-life scenarios as well as conducting her own behavioral research and found that sharing a commons does not always end a tragedy. Rather than taking power away from local people and putting it in the hands of a national government, she found that giving local people a say and allowing them to have an influence on rules related to managing a forest, grassland, a fishery, or public health will allow sustainable management of that common good. It's cool stuff, and as my last post on "Mini miracles in Chattanooga" mentioned, I felt like I knew a trip to Uganda to see mountain gorillas and report on the amazing work of Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH) was destined after I ran into Dr Gladys (CTPH founder) at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference.

Here's a link to my bio and project info on the Mongabay Special Reporting Initiative Fellows page. I can't tell you how thrilled I am that I will be traveling to Uganda to be face to face with mountain gorillas within a few months!! I have been rereading George Schaller's Year of the Gorilla and need to get another copy of Dian Fossey's Gorillas in the Mist because mine is falling apart.

I just returned from a week in Oregon, and will post some photos from my trip soon. First I still have a post from a visit I made to DC in October. I'm getting behind on my blog!

Mini Miracles in Chattanooga, Tennessee

The Tellico River in Tennessee. We visited, snorkeled, and waded through the river as part of the 2013 Society of Environmental Journalists Conference Copyright (c) 2013 Wendee Nicole.

I got back from the Society of Environmental Journalists Conference in Chattanooga, Tennessee a couple weeks ago and, as usual, had a fantabulous time. SEJ conferences are the absolute best writers' conferences in the world! They have the right mix of craft sessions and topical sessions, which I get a lot of great story ideas from. I love the Thursday Tours they have every year, where you go in the field along with a smaller group of SEJers, as well as biologists, business folk, politicians, or other people who tell us about whatever the tour topic is. I went on a "Biodiversity" Tour which involved snorkeling! We were supposed to go to one place in a National Forest but had to change it due to the federal government being shut down. Ahem. The conference seemed very small this year, probably because of the absence of federal government employees! That meant that several panel members for various sessions were missing in action, and it definitely affected the conference experience.

I called this post Mini Miracles because the most amazing thing happened! Well, a couple miracles - which will play themselves out in time - but the first one is so stupendous that my jaw still drops to the floor when I think of it. So the week of the conference, Monday and Tuesday respectively, I turned in my application for two grants -- the brand-new Mongabay Special Reporting Initiative (on the topic of tropical forest conservation) and the Alicia Patterson Fellowship. The focus of my grants was polycentric governance, a concept so revolutionary it won Elinor Ostrom the Nobel Prize in Economics. I won't get into the details here but to say, it essentially presents rules for how commonly shared resources -- forests, fisheries, air, water -- can be managed in a way to avoid the infamous "Tragedy of the Commons."

Ostrom turned the idea of the tragedy of the commons on its ear. So in my grant proposals, I chose several examples of polycentric governance in action, including the crown jewel of the application in my mind, which was this amazing project in Uganda called Conservation Through Public Health. Ugandan Vet Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka started this nonprofit to help improve the lives, health, and well-being of the people living immediately outside Bwindi Impenetrable Park, home to half the world's remaining mountain gorillas (and, my favorite animal!). The people living outside the park live in abject poverty, and because gorillas and people are so closely related they can and do pass diseases back and forth. Tourism to see gorillas in Uganda has picked up since the 1990s, meaning the gorillas are now more habituated to humans and they leave the park more than they used to because they don't see people as a threat. That has led to gorillas getting human diseases like scabies mites and tuberculosis, and gorillas are a critically endangered species. CTPH has helped empower the local people to take charge of their health, family planning, and well-being. That involves not just education but also teaching local individuals to become leaders in their own right, passing these messages of human health, family planning and about gorilla conservation and attitudes, to others especially people living in remote areas. CTPH also created a network whereby local healers report possible cases of tuberculosis and other diseases to health clinics for better monitoring of these health ailments. It's pretty cool stuff.

I first found out about CTPH through the Wilson Center, where Dr Kalema-Zikusoka had given a seminar (which I watched online), the week before the conference. I had emailed her and we exchanged a few brief emails about my project, but not too much since she was busy traveling. So like I said, Monday and Tuesday I submitted these grant apps on their deadlines. Wednesday I get up for my 530am flight to Chattanooga, I arrive at noonish, get a shuttle to the conference, and walk into the Population session halfway through the day - and who is there before me, across the room, but Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka!! I went over and introduced myself and she was so sweet and gave me a big hug. We were able to talk a bit more during the conference about what it's like to travel to Uganda, and the logistics, and my project ideas. I had no idea she would be there. What are the chances? It felt like a mini-miracle to me, and a blessing. I also spoke a bit with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ken Weiss, formerly of the LA Times, who has been to Uganda and reported on the work of CTPH. So keep your fingers crossed and pray for me that this works out and I get to go over there! I also submitted an app for funding through the Pulitzer Center. I am excited about reporting on these projects and hope I am able to get some sort of funding.

Ugandan Vet Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka from Conservation Through Public Health in Uganda & Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ken Weiss on a panel at the SEJ conference.

Thursday was the "Tour" day and as mentioned above, I went on the "Biodiversity" Tour which went to the beautiful Tellico River. Everyone got in hip waders to walk into the shallow, wide river to watch biologists catch some fish and amphibians while telling us about various conservation efforts in the area.

Me in hip waders -- because I like to go with the sexy wader look at conferences.

The biologists used electrofishing to stun the fish so they could show us journalists. This shows several spotfin chub, a federally threatened fish reintroduced into the Tellico River by Conservation Fisheries Inc (CFI).

A red-lined darter biologists caught by electrofishing in the Tellico River. The fish biodiversity is very high in the Appalachians.

Rock bass & other fish from the Tellico River.

A crawdad!

After we had lunch and the sun came out, it was time to get in the water and snorkel. This is myself and a new friend, Liz Kimbrough, who works for Mongabay.

The picture didn't capture this well because I actually didnt have my camera in the river, but at one point all the biologists in their wetsuits started walking across this part of the stream with sharpish rocks towards where one of the biologists have captured a young hellbender salamander, and someone called out that they all looked like zombies moving and THEY DID!! It was hilarious!!! Everyone was moving slowly and deliberately and with their arms sort of outstretched, and it was so funny.

Thursday night was the "schmooze & booze" otherwise known as the Hospitality Events! Various companies and nonprofits set up sections with hors doevres and drinks and information. That night, VW unveiled a new vehicle, too: the electric Volkswagen XL1 - pretty bad ass!

Two of my favorite SEJers, Dale Willman and Jim Motavalli.

On Friday night, the conference had their annual soiree at the Chattanooga Aquarium which was so nice! We had libations and food and people were milling around the entire place. In fact, the place was so spread out that it took 3 hours to get through the whole thing and I'm not sure I even saw everything. But around 10pm I met Joe Romm (blogger at Climate Progress). Me, Joe, and some other friends went to a bar next door, Blue Plate, and stayed til 2am!

Silly iPhone pic Joe took. It was a lot of fun. He's such a sweetheart!

Jeff Burnside and Heidi Ridgley, who hung out with us that night. Heidi is an editor at Defenders Magazine and is who I traveled to Costa Rica with earlier this year.