Season 4, Episode 16: On Eco-Friends with Gregory Hill
image credit | Lauren Richmond
Season 4, Episode 16: On Eco-Friends with Gregory Hill
Thomas and Panu had a warm conversation with a long time friend and colleague of Thomas, environmental science and advocacy expert Gregory Hill. They explored the idea of “eco-friends”—the close personal relationships we have with friends and collaborators that support and inspire us in our environmental values and actions. Greg recounted his life from early connections with the desert lands of Arizona to his discovery of Buddhism and classic environmental literature, and his varied academic career. He described his research on the Pacific salmon and his service with First Nations peoples in Canada seeking legal sovereignty. The conversation highlighted the importance of the community we have and how our friendships contribute to the long term history and stability of our environmental identities. While friendships are certainly a form of social capital, our eco-friends are especially important to hold dear.
Links
Roderick Nash The Rights of Nature
Cairns, Johannes, and Panu Pihkala. 2024. ‘How Western Buddhist Climate Activists Negotiate Climate Emotions’. Frontiers in Psychology
Transcript
Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.
[music: “CC&H theme music”]
Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CC&H), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala.
Thomas Doherty: Well hello, I’m Thomas Doherty.
Panu Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.
Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness, this is our podcast. It’s a show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and other environmental issues. We pose this provocative question, what does it mean to be happy in the modern world? And Panu is an emotions researcher and I'm a psychologist. Panu’s in Finland and I'm in Portland, Oregon, Panu's evening, my morning. We're really happy about a few things. I'm going to introduce a special guest here in a moment. We've also been looking at some of our podcast stats for 2024 and we have listeners in 35 countries, all around the world. We have thousands of listeners. We're not a huge podcast, obviously, it's a specialized niche but we do have thousands of listeners. And so, listeners, I want you to know you're not alone. There are people coming from all around the world. Some of the countries you might imagine like the US, Canada, and the UK, but also Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand, and Indonesia. And so, we have a lot of folks that are listening. And today, we have a special guest.
Gregory Hill: I think I'm going to introduce myself. I’m Gregory Hill. I'm an academic of all kinds of different subjects and hopefully still a good eco-friend.
Doherty: Yeah and Greg is here in Portland and he is a long standing friend of mine. Our episode theme today is this idea of eco-friends. It's a concept I kind of coined in this book manuscript I'm working on. It's not a complicated idea. It's just the idea that we have friends in the world that inspire us and help us to develop our own environmental identity and our own environmental values and we share our work and goals with them. Sometimes we work directly with them or sometimes we just hear what they're doing. Sometimes they're in a far field career from what we're doing, but I think everyone around the world can think about eco-friends that they have. It could be personal friends or family or colleagues or distant people. I would consider Panu and I to be eco-friends. We don't meet in person, but we know each other through the distance. And some friends are longstanding life friends and some are new. But that's the concept for today just to get into. So, listeners, I want you to be thinking about eco-friends that you might have and or can cultivate or find. Greg is a very interesting eco-friend. He's done a lot of things. He's originally from Arizona in the US and he's spent time growing up around the Grand Canyon and exploring in the Grand Canyon. He exemplifies a lot of the trend of environmental action over the last, you know, few decades. When he was younger, he worked in anti-nuclear weapons advocacy. He has worked around the world… In Indonesia in the forest reclaiming tropical wood, he has been a mathematician, an environmental studies professor, a baseball player, and a chess player. Now, recently, he does research on salmon and dams in the Northwest and works with First Nations people in Canada to assert their rights and autonomy. So really interesting possibilities. And Panu, I know you have eco-friends as well. And I'm sure in Finland, that's an idea that would go over well. Panu, do you want to get us started today?
Pihkala: Pleased to meet you, Greg. So, we have a quite different dynamic here between the three of us. I know that you two have indeed known each other for a long time, but Greg when you think about the roots of this vocation, you've had a strong interest and motivation to work with the natural world or the modern human world, what comes to your mind? What would you like to share about the roots and foundations and perhaps early life history in relation to that?
Bill: Well, the roots are certainly my mother. My parents moved to Arizona from Iowa. And my mother really took to the Sonoran Desert that I grew up in in Southern Arizona. Over my right shoulder here, I don't know if anybody can see this, there's a backpack and it's my mother's backpack. She and I would go backpacking together. Before backpacking, we were exploring the desert together when I was in the single digits age. So, she really taught me to appreciate nature, but also while appreciating the social life, like our social relationships. And that has percolated all the way through my entire career, where I study systems, specifically social ecological systems. I could talk just about my mother the entire time.
Pihkala: That's a good sign of a person and I can actually see the backpack. Too bad dear listeners that you can’t see the visuals, but it still looks in good condition with various marks.
Hill: It's got a lot of badges on it, some of which were because of directions that I made my parents drive when we went to California. We would drive to California and I would make them stop at certain places like along the Pacific Crest Trail, which is a trail that goes all the way from Mexico to Canada, up the west side of the United States. I would make them get badges and some of those badges are right there. They've been there a long time.
Pihkala: Oh yeah, that's wonderful. You have this strong interest in learning systems approaches now. But were there earlier phases in your engagements with the natural world or was there something that first motivated you which led to developing a more systems-like approach? How did that work for you?
Hill: Well, the systems approach definitely took a lot longer to develop. My first kind of explorations, Thomas was referring to some of them, like my exploration of the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. I was a member of a backpacking organization. I was with a friend and we were the youngest ones. We were, I think, 14 when we joined. It was a little controversial to have kids that young. We couldn't drive, for instance, but we got rides with people all the way up to the Grand Canyon. And I had some really incredible experiences up there as a youngster, both social and ecological. I would help people because there were some older people on these trips and going down into the Grand Canyon can be pretty rugged. One woman who is my friend's mother came with us and she was really struggling and I carried her backpack as well as my backpack out of the Grand Canyon. Combining that social engagement with nature is old for me. And I didn't think of it in a systems kind of way then, but it certainly came naturally to me later.
Pihkala: Hmm. Yeah and it also links with this theme that Thomas spoke about eco-friends who are friends who share environmental values or identity with you, or friends who share at least some parts of our journeys in relation to the modern human world. And there's often mentoring figures. We earlier, during an episode, talked with Louise Chawla who has done research on various things that affect people's relationship with the natural world. Usually when they are young, it's quite common to have at least some close person, perhaps a grandparent if not parents or an uncle or aunt or local Boy Scout leader or Girl Scout leader who becomes quite formational in leading us into a deeper engagement with what surrounds us. So in my mind that theme of mentoring and, broadly speaking, educating also links with this topic of eco-friendship. But what about you two? You said that you are eco-friends so how does that manifest in practice? What does it mean to be an eco-friend?
Doherty: Yeah, I can share a little bit about it. Like a lot of friends, we have slightly different stories about our pasts and how we met, just like siblings will have different memories. But I'm just thinking about Greg in the Grand Canyon. For listeners who haven't been to the Grand Canyon, it's very deep. I've met people that grew up near the Alps, for example, or near other mountains and they from a young age learn to climb up the mountains and perhaps help guide other people up the mountains. But in the Grand Canyon, it's easy to get to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. You essentially just keep walking and rolling down to the bottom. But getting out is like climbing a mountain. So, I think that what Greg is saying, carrying that pack out is like carrying someone's pack up the Matterhorn or something like that.
Hill: Well that same group that I went to the Grand Canyon with, we also climbed a lot of mountains. So that's one thing that, for instance, is the same between me living here in Portland, Oregon and Arizona. It’s a very different climate from Arizona, but the same mountains. Not the same mountain range, but the same structure of the mountains. And so I feel at home, even though it's raining all the time here. And it's not raining in Arizona, let me tell you.
Doherty: Yeah, that's the system's perspective. We can see similarities around the world in different ecosystems. But how Greg and I met or at least my recollection of it… this would be coming on 25 or 23 years ago, I think. We actually met at a Zen meditation retreat at a place called the Great Vow Zen center here in Western Oregon which is a traditional American Zen monastery. And we actually met at a unique event. It was a deep ecology retreat at the Zen Center. And one of the speakers there was Michael Soulé, who was a conservation biologist, who’s one of the founders of conservation biology. It was this fruitful mashup of conservation and environmental consciousness and Buddhism, in this case, Zen Buddhism. And I think, Greg, that is one of the strong strands in your life that, if not introduced you to systems thinking, at least it kind of exemplifies systems thinking.
Hill: Indeed, yes. Zen Buddhism is something that I first encountered when I was 16. And I was a fan of the Beat Generation. And I somehow managed to get permission from my mother to drive all the way from Tucson to San Francisco. I didn't drive, but I had a friend who could drive and had a car. We actually drove nonstop from Tucson, Arizona to San Francisco. Now, not just any place in San Francisco, but to the City Lights Bookstore. Do either of you know the City Lights Bookstore?
Doherty: I do, yeah.
Hill: It was kind of a home base for the Beat Generation and all those books. So, I went there. One of the people I read when I was reading about the Beat Generation was this guy, Gary Snyder, who was a poet. I really admired his poetry and he was also a Zen guy. And so, through reading his work when I was young, I learned about the San Francisco Zen Center when it was just starting up. So, I broke off from my little group of three people when we were visiting there and walked across downtown to the San Francisco Zen Center. I poked my head in, somebody greeted me, and I felt welcomed. For instance, I'm going back for a month-long retreat in three months. So, I've been with the San Francisco Zen Center for a long time. My favorite part of the San Francisco Zen Center is their farm, which is called Green Gulch Farm. And it's also a retreat center. It's one of those beautiful places that combines, I'm going to say it again, social and ecological engagement and how they're connected with each other. So that's the system between social and ecological.
Pihkala: Yeah, that's lovely and interesting to hear. I have a background in studying religion and environment, and Buddhism also comes from there. There's a book which might also interest some listeners by Roderick Nash, an environmental historian, called Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics which is quite interesting and also devotes several pages on Gary Snyder and the strong interest on Zen Buddhism in North America among environmentally minded people, but it's also related to present day activities. One of my dissertation students, who is also a young colleague, is a practicing Buddhist in Finland, but he's been doing extended interviews of Western engaged Buddhists in climate action. So that paper came out about a month ago and it's quite interesting to hear what the Buddhists have been able to give to the climate movement. There's some special features… so, that’s just some of my thoughts reflecting on what you said and I also see the connection between Buddhism and the systems approach between the social and ecological.
Doherty: Yeah, and I would just like to add, one of our favorite themes here is environmental identity and our sense of self in relation to nature and the natural world. And I often say that art and literature is part of our environmental identity. And you know, Greg's example is great. I know this is not unique to Greg or to Panu or to me. Many people are obviously influenced by Buddhism around the world, but also the Beat Generation and the poets and writers there and that lifestyle or that vision that they evoked in the US in the 1950s and 60s. And we don't necessarily think of it as an environmental identity at the time when we're younger. We’re just finding the world and absorbing everything. But, it does become part of our environmental ethos and leads us to value things and then take action, right? So, I think it's a fair statement, Greg, to say you've been an activist at times in your life, based on your social ecological values.
Hill: Oh yeah, and I have to share one thing that combines these. So, 60th anniversaries are a big deal in Japan. It's a time when you become an elder, and in Japan, that's a good thing. On the 60th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, my Zen community gathered together and went to Japan with the whole group for two weeks. I went for five weeks. So, I traveled on my own for quite a while. We had all sorts of engagements with anti-nuclear weapons work, the social engagement around Buddhism and particular Buddhist teachers, Dogen, I think of in particular. Then, traveling around Japan, on my own, was an incredible lesson in social engagement with others when we don't share a language. This may seem like a silly example, but I was traveling around on the trains and I went all the way south. There are trains everywhere and they really run on time. And the tickets tell you how to get to the next station in Japanese. I couldn't read Japanese at all. I could speak a little bit, but I couldn't read it at all. So, I would just get off the train, I would hold up my ticket in front of me and inevitably, a Japanese person would see my ticket, grab me by the hand, and walk me to the place I had to go. Even if it was just two minutes away. I was doing all this traveling like climbing mountains and that kind of kindness was really connecting all those things about socialization and how they're connected to the environment. It was very powerful to me. And I brought it back to Portland, Oregon. I had a meeting with a minister, not a minister that we have in the United States, but a minister of peace that’s a cabinet level position in Japan. A friend of mine who is bilingual, in Japanese and English, and incredibly tall, he’s 6' 11, arranged the meeting. He went to that minister with me and I made my case while he translated. At the end, this minister revealed that he had really good English and he said to me, “we have to do this.” And so, I brought all these artifacts from the bombings to Oregon to exhibit and I brought four Japanese men to herd around. That was really fun. The exhibit was on for two months. So, the Zen thing is also all mixed in with social and environmental stuff for me. It's a trifecta.
Doherty: Yeah, so you can see why I like Greg. He's just no lack of interesting stories and he really is a world citizen and it's inspiring. Where should we go in our conversation? Greg, in terms of our environmental identity and our eco-timeline, it continues our whole life and we're always extending that timeline and what is the Japanese name for the 60th birthday? If there's any Japanese listeners out there, you can remind us of the special name for that and you wear a special hat for your 60th birthday.
Hill: Oh and you came to my 60th birthday party.
Doherty: Yeah, I did. Greg had a great gathering… talk about eco-friends. That was an incredible gathering of eco-friends.
Hill: Everyone around that table were eco-friends.
Doherty: It’s one of those things that when I have an old friend and they meet another of my old friends, it's often fairly quick that everyone connects. So, we don't even realize that we have a larger friend connection than we know because all of our eco-friends have eco-friends. And we're often all on the same page. At your party, you played a game and had truth or dare stories about your past, which I remember was fun which we won't go into now. But going forward, what are some ways that you're extending your timeline? I know that's a huge question, obviously, but what comes up for you? Maybe the First Nations work that you're doing in Canada or the salmon work?
Hill: Well, I've very recently been liberated. A lot of people call it retirement. For me, I don't have to grade papers anymore. And I am completely in charge of my daily routine, which took me a while to understand. I didn't retire very long ago, just a year ago, so I'm still learning how to do things, but I'm using this freedom I have now to do a lot of things that I wasn't able to do when I was pinned down by other people's schedules. For instance, one thing is I’m helping with a lot of partners to arrange, you mentioned the work I did with indigenous people in Canada. The main person there was this man named Satsan. And he, for instance, changed the constitution of the country through a legal process that took many years. That was all before I met him. It’s one thing to have the right to self-determination, which he got the legal part down where First Nations had the inherent right to self-governance. Before that, they weren’t even close to any right like that, so he won that right. But exerting that right is another thing. And that's where I worked with him and the system stuff came in really well. Because Satsan, when he was sent to residential school and taken away from his family, somehow got a book that was about systems thinking, with all the diagrams. So, he and I really connected on that level. We became really close partners and dear friends throughout many years. And now I'm trying to arrange a trip for him to the United States. Now the rule with him, since he's kind of famous now, is that he only does things that have national visibility, that make the news across Canada. I'm trying to do one that's based in the United States that still has that impact across Canada so I'm working on that. That's just one of the things I'm working on these days.
Doherty: Wow, that's great. So, you're really leveraging a lot now to make change that's going to affect history and people for generations to come.
Hill: Satsan’s the history maker. I'm the assistant to the history maker.
Doherty: Panu, what's coming up for you as you're listening and observing this eco-friend banter that we're having?
Pihkala: Well, it's fascinating how many things, Greg, you have been in touch with. I hear a strong commitment to justice issues. Some people nowadays use framing like climate justice or injustice and of course, environmental justice and I think that's an integral part of having a socio-ecological view on things or systems. Environmental organizations and institutions are luckily picking that up if they haven't done it before and for example, in Finland, the climate change expert panel, which is a national thing, did work many years ago on social acceptability and justice dimensions of climate issues so that's one part of trying to advance things on a practical level.
Doherty: What's the most exciting part of this for you Greg as you have this freedom moving on from your teaching? We won't get into that, but you of course influenced a lot of students and people over the years. What's the equivalent of climbing the mountain or some challenge or task that you look forward to doing coming up?
Hill: I've had a really long and deep connection to Indonesia and to Southeast Asia, in general. A lot of it has been through a dear friend of mine who now lives in Portland. His name's Tim O'Brien. We have been back and forth between the United States and Indonesia for a long time. Part of that is connected to the environment, social stuff, and ethics. One outcome of that, which has only fairly recently found its full realization, is a forest-based carbon offset project. I've been told it’s the largest forest-based carbon offset project in the world. It's in Kalimantan and it's the work of two Indonesians, Rezal Kusumaatmadja and Dharsono Hartono. But Tim and I were definitely part of the team and that has only recently seen its full realization as a carbon offset project with all of the numbers. It was protecting a peat forest, which is probably the densest carbon offset per acre in the world. There was a peat forest that was in danger of being destroyed for its wood value and we managed to protect that. It’s really happening and I was excited about it. One of the people who was involved with that was in Portland recently and we had a good conversation about it and he's following up in Indonesia with solar stuff in Java. My whole time there was really exciting and I want to go back and Tim and I have, of course, plans to go back.
Doherty: Yeah, this is great, this web of friendship. I think it's a good place to wrap up our conversation today. Of course, we could go on and on, but it's that web and you keep following the web and it leads to more and more things and realizing that saving a forest these days isn't just about the forest, it's about the entire global ecosystem. That's one of the new insights of climate consciousness. It's not just the beauty of a particular place, although that's obviously important too. The integrity of an individual place has ramifications for the whole global system, and it comes back to the human and ecological systems as you were saying, Greg, we have to work together and then we have to have that big picture thought. This has been great. I really have been looking forward to having you on the podcast, Greg. It's a nice record of our relationship and sharing it with Panu and maybe Panu, we can have you bring an eco-friend next year as well. That would be nice. So, let's wrap it up. Listeners, I hope you got something out of this and your homework if you like is to think about and connect with your eco-friends and recognize that you are eco-friends and just name that because I think people will appreciate that. Otherwise, listeners, take care. And Greg and Panu, I'll let you have the last word.
Hill: I'm down with this eco-friends. Can we make it social eco-friends?
Doherty: Sure, I'll see you around the campfire soon. And Panu, where are you headed today?
Pihkala: Yeah, it's been a pleasure getting to know a bit about you, Greg. It's just a glimpse through the clouds to a large terrain. There's evidently lots of feeling grateful for that in the dark Finnish evening. It's the darkest time of the year, but this is soon about to change, so there's going to be more light.
Doherty: Yes. Anyway, listeners and everyone, find us at climatechangeandhappiness.com and I appreciate our listeners all around the world and everyone be well.
[music: “CC&H theme music”]
