I grew up in the small town atmosphere of Southwestern Washington State during the 1970’s and 1980’s, when environmental organizations and the logging industry simply refused to engage in an open and meaningful dialogue with one another and with local communities. The result is a ravaged patchwork of harvested areas separated by absurd strips of forest, an almost total collapse of the regional economy, the slow and tortuous deaths of families and communities everywhere, and a situation in which high school kids feel compelled to mount spotted owls on the hoods of their Chevy pick-ups. It is a place where stands of old-growth Douglas Fir are displayed like museum exhibits. For the most part, the particular land that I call home is now just a wasted battlefield. I find it difficult to justify the lack of morality and equity – the basic social reductionism – of industries and environmental organizations who by their very approach create a mutually exclusive playing field. For me, the power and potential of community advocacy was nurtured as a response to the landscapes left behind by those whose actions undermined the creation of an open and meaningful dialogue, and treated human diversity and multivocality as obstacles to be overcome rather than as gifts to be treasured and nurtured.

Community advocacy/development/capacity-building (take your pick) is a field littered with false prophets, partial success stories, and a slew of unintended consequences. It is an industry based on buzzwords and beacons, the latter sitting on the tops of hills that are seemingly never reached. I have worked with or alongside many of the most notable community development organizations in the World – in areas where “development” is a theology and the “community” is little more than an historical precedent – and I can attest to failure after failure after failure. I can only guess at the reasons for this, but I believe it is because most community development work is built on an implicit yet well established foundation of condescension. There is a lack of continuity with the people themselves, a refusal to engage with a particular community over the long haul, and to do so as a student of that community – because that is what you need to become: a perennial, situated student. The most successful projects I have seen have been conducted by such individuals, or by community members themselves, most of whom became fed up with the actions of “outside” organizations and who chose to work in the ‘spaces in between.’ Some of the best community development work I have seen began as everyday acts of resistance.

I have heard it said many times before that in order to truly understand conservation work, we need to walk the lands we seek to protect as much as possible. I would add to this idea that we also need to sit in the living rooms and at the kitchen tables of the people who call that land home; we need to listen to them – all of them. While so many claim to do it, I rarely bump into them in the streets, and I have never seen them at the kitchen tables or around the cooking fires of those for whom they claim to give voice. It demands a long-term commitment, and a certain degree of faith and devotion, often to people who have never been treated as anything other than as a problem.

I began working for Round River because it was apparent that they had already firmly established a process of listening to the Taku River Tlingit First Nation’s. One result of this work was the publication of Our Land is Our Future; Vision and Management Direction for Land and Resources of the TRTFN Territory. In this document, the TRTFN defined, amongst other things, a wide-ranging series of community development objectives and directions. It is my job to help make this vision a reality through specific projects and activities, including the development of land-based social and education programs, Tlingit language and culture curriculum at the local schools, social health initiatives, and cultural resource management activities. It also includes taking advantage of opportunities as they arise, especially those that nurture the inherent strengths of the community (and there are plenty). And of course, it includes simply being there. These activity areas reflect a TRTFN vision of their land that can only be understood in terms of their own health and well-being. Sophisticated and comprehensive visions such as this do not always sit well with the exclusive, dichotomizing perspective of contemporary organizations, and Western-oriented notions of the natural environment that are fractious at best. I believe it can be achieved, however without compromising the vision of the TRTFN or the fundamental mission of Round River, simply because there is a significant degree of overlap between the two. Listening tends naturally to lead to a constant dialogue in which the lines become wonderfully blurred.

I have little faith that grassroots community development work in and of itself will win many victories these days, especially in the face of a globally unified economy based on neo-liberal ideals and practices, most of which benefit industrial giants at the expense of local communities and grounded democracies. Structural violence of this kind has simply crushed too many of my own efforts in too many places around the globe for me to cling to that kind of hope. It has been a hard lesson.

I do believe, however, that community development is an incredibly powerful and effective tool when it works in tandem with scientific endeavors, legal and political action, economic development initiatives, and communications strategies – and when all of these, of course, are guided by the voices of community members themselves. This is happening in the Taku, which is why I believe the unprecedented vision that we share of an ecologically and socio-economically sustainable community is entirely within our grasp.

– Chris Lockhart, Conservation Scientist