Robin Carneen (Swinomish)–Radio Host 
Robert Lundahl, Filmmaker, Journalist 
Scott Ressler, Sr. Producer, National Geographic Society 
Dave Skinner–Glacier Researcher/University of Washington 
Natalie Monterrosa–Marine Scientist 
Enrique Lanz Oca, Ph.D. Professor, Hunter College, Geography and Environmental Science 
Howard Sprouse–CEO The Remediators Inc. 
Qacung Stephen Blanchett (Yup’ik)–Recording Artist 
Mike Macy,–Author, Bodyworker, Yukon Traveler 
MJ Jackson–Alaska Commercial Fisherman/Bristol Bay 
Dr. Oliver Mupila, Physician, Researcher Natural Plant Medicine/Zambia 
Ilarion (Larry) Merculieff (Unangan/Aleut) Kuuyux
Robert Lundahl, is an Bauhaus educated STE(A)M leadership advisor to universities, think tanks and companies. He is an Emmy® Award Winning Filmmaker, Communications Consultant, and Writer. Lundahl founded Agence in 1989 in Santa Clara, CA.
Walter Munk Foundation for the Oceans is a Strategic Partner of Agence RLA, LLC in supporting the implementation of the Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area Executive Order.
Global Center for Indigenous Leadership and Lifeways (GCILL)
Bringing ancient Indigenous ways of knowing and wisdom
into modern times
GCILL is a Strategic Partner of Agence RLA, LLC in supporting the implementation the Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area Executive Order.
Robert Lundahl Producer Statement:
For several weeks, I have been conducting interviews with other filmmakers, scientists, and experts familiar with Climate Change. I have also been attending online ZOOM meetings with members from an organization called the Greenbelt Society-made up of “a diverse group of professionals, faculty, alumni and students affiliated with the Department of Geography and Environmental Science at Hunter College in New York City.”
Their topics of discussion have been about the Elwha dam deconstruction and river restoration project. The other topic being discussed has been about a Village in Alaska called Quinhagak, where the loss of permafrost and erosion of land due to the rising sea levels are having devastating effects on many Villages, including theirs.
To try and remedy this critical situation, they have started using an organic approach known as bio-remediation, using mushrooms to clean up leaking oil and gas caused by unstable foundations from melting permafrost.
The Personal is the Planet.
Zoom out. That an establishing shot here and there of a global phenomenon should connect with people is an assumption and expectation of this adventure. As we begin to “see through the eyes of” individuals from different locations and communities, we begin to understand climate change from a personal and a planetary perspective.
Episode XI: Robert Lundahl Interviews Patrick Anderson Part II
Race, Resource, and Responsibility, Crisis on the Tundra.
Interview by Filmmaker, Journalist, Robert Lundahl.
Patrick Anderson (Tlingit), Thunderbird Clan, Attorney, Health Administrator and tribal manager discusses the Health of Alaska Natives in the era of Climate Change. Patrick most recently served as CEO of Alaska Rural Cap, and as a long term board member of Sealaska Corporation. Patrick’s focus is on Toxic Stress, Adverse Childhood Experiences (Aces), and intergenerational trauma.
Where do we go from here in the face of enormous costs of survival and tenuous connections to traditional resource harvesting and utilization, the bowhead whale, now nearly inaccessible to hunters due to the loss of pack ice?
Episode X: Robert Lundahl Interviews Patrick Anderson
Environment and Heath in Alaska, Indicators and Influences.
Interview by Filmmaker, Journalist, Robert Lundahl.
Patrick Anderson (Tlingit), Thunderbird Clan, Attorney, Health Administrator and tribal manager discusses the Health of Alaska Natives in the era of Climate Change. Patrick most recently served as CEO of Alaska Rural Cap, and as a long term board member of Sealaska Corporation. Patrick’s focus is on Toxic Stress, Adverse Childhood Experiences (Aces), and intergenerational trauma.
There are intractable problems, knotted incapacities. Wrong silo, trapped by administrative regulations into a cage of inaction only an attorney could love, and probably not an environmental or a human rights attorney. So the question becomes how to peel apart the layers, face the brutal abuse and colonial rampage that resides in the bloodstream of native populations as well as the toxic stress lying across and connecting cultures, native and non native alike, particular to Alaska.
Episode IX: Robert Lundahl Interviews Jeff Hallowell
The Native Village of Kivalina, a federally recognized Indian Tribe living on a barrier island in the Chukchi Sea, 80 miles north of Kotzebue and above the Arctic Circle, has a series of existential, compounding problems that render life there scary.
There is no escape road from the island if threatening seas, now ice free later in the season, inundate the entire settlement, whose elevation is 13 feet. If that’s not enough, there’s pollution, a lack of sanitation, and scarce and overcrowded housing. Like many communities in Alaska, there is also a suicide crisis, villagers and sometimes youth without hope and seemingly without a future. These are the impacts of Climate Change on a far flung island where villagers try to stay safe hunting Bowhead whales from increasingly dangerous ice.
As Men’s Journey so noted in the article, “The Last Whale Hunt for a Vanishing Alaskan Village,” October 12, 2016, https://www.mensjournal.com/features/the-last-whale-hunt-for-a-vanishing-village-kivalina-alaska-w443825/
“Outsiders who spend time in the village sometimes feel as though they’ve traveled in time to some not-too-distant future in which the government has finally imploded after years of dysfunction, leaving the people to fend for themselves, like Mad Max but with snowmobiles. In most of the houses, the toilet is a bucket.”
Jeff Hallowell is a man with an idea. Formerly a Silicon Valley engineer, for companies like Xerox, Netscape, and Oracle, he became a “serial entrepreneur.”
Working with Launch Alaska and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation program to “Reinvent the Toilet,” Hallowell takes on the now less dirty job of returning carbon from human waste to the earth, for agriculture, erosion prevention, and carbon sequester, buttressing the shore, and restoring dignity and safety to Americans living in what we presume to be 4th World conditions, dangerous and distressing, right here at home, in the richest country on Earth.
Have we forgotten the people of Kivalina? Or could there be a partial solution? And is there time, with imminent relocation perhaps necessary by 2025?
Episode VIII: Robert Lundahl Interviews Ilarion Merculieff Part 2.
In Episode VII Robert Lundahl interviews Ilarion Merculieff.
Interview with Ilarion Merculieff–Filmmaker Robert Lundahl.
Ilarion Merculieff has more than forty years experience serving his people, the Unangan (Aleut) of the Pribilof Islands and other indigenous peoples locally, nationally, and internationally in a number of leadership capacities. Ilarion was the first Alaska Native commissioner of the Alaska Department of Commerce and Economic Development, a state cabinet post. He also served as the chair of the indigenous knowledge sessions of the Global Summit of Indigenous Peoples on Climate Change in 2009 and as the chair of the scientific committee for Snowchange in 2005, a consortium of indigenous leaders from eight Arctic countries focused on climate change. Ilarion has also engaged in a western states speaking tour on climate change and worked with the Great Lakes tribes to develop strategies for culturally based adaptation to climate changes.
Ilarion is the co-founder of the Indigenous Peoples’ Council for Marine Mammals, the Alaska Forum on the Environment, the International Bering Sea Forum, and the Alaska Oceans Network. He has received a number of awards including the Buffet Finalist Award for Indigenous Leadership, the Environmental Excellence Award for lifetime achievement from the Alaska Forum on the Environment, Rasmuson Foundation award for Creative Non-Fiction, and the Alaska Native Writers on the Environment Award. Ilarion is featured as one of ten Native Americans in the book Native American Men of Courage by Second Story Press. Ilarion’s co-authored book, Aleut Wisdom: Stories of an Aleut Messenger, was released two years ago by Les Intouchables (published in French). He is co-author of the recently released, Stop Talking: Indigenous Ways of Teaching and Learning, which is free to anyone who asks through the University of Alaska Anchorage campus. His latest book is Wisdomkeeper: One Man’s Journey to Honor the Untold Story of the Unangan People, published by North Atlantic Books.
Ilarion is currently an independent consultant/president of the Global Center for Indigenous Leadership and Lifeways (GCILL) and serves as a Senior Advisor to the World Wilderness Congress and advisor to the Native Lands and Wilderness Council. His passion is speaking of traditional Elder wisdom for modern challenges, particularly about restoring women to their place as original healers and balancing the dysfunctional masculine. He is working on a third book. The working title is Tuunam Awaa, which means the “Work of the Land” in Aleut language.
Ilarion Merculieff, tells stories from his Pribilof Island homeland of St. Paul and St. George Islands in the middle of the Bering Sea, 250 miles north of the Aleutians..
He expresses concerns about Arctic ecosystems generally, and in specific as related to multiple species of birds, marine mammals, and fish, including the Yukon River and it’s salmon.
Ilarion discusses TKW, Traditonal Knowledge and Wisdom, and the role it plays in resource management, and the structural thought process behind it as a science.
Update on the Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area.
In Episode VI:
Filmmaker and Journalist Robert Lundahl interviews Kanema Oliver Mupila Kameya, who is a medical doctor, an Author, Gerontologist, Environmentalist, and Human Rights Defender.
Dr. Mupila is founder of the Centre of Excellence on Ageing, an Initiative of the Zambian International Health Alliance of which he is the CEO.
He has written over 700 articles on Ageing, with an interest in Biodiversity, Conservation and Sustainable Development of which have been featured in several local and International Electronic and Print Media, including The Times of Zambia, Zambian Daily Mail, among others.
Dr. Mupila studied in Austria, Denmark, Malta and the USA. He lived and worked in the United States for over ten years as a Development Consultant, and a Plant Medicine Scientist, doing research on Indigenous Plant Medicine from 2000 to 2020, after interacting with over Ten Thousand Indigenous Tribal Elders.
Dr. Mupila Lives in Lusaka and is an Indigenous Lunda from the Chibwika Chiefdom, Village Kameya in Mwinilunga North-Western Zambia.
Mupila sees the connections between social and economic justice and environmental health.
In Episode V: Filmmaker and Journalist, Robert Lundahl interviews Alaska Commercial Fisherman MJ Jackson, and Radio Host Robin Carneen.
In Episode IV: Filmmaker and Journalist, Robert Lundahl interviews Recording Artist Qacung, and Author, Bodyworker and Yukon Traveler, Mike Macy.
In Episode III: Filmmaker and Journalist, Robert Lundahl interviews Enrique Lanz Oca, Ph.D., Founder of the Greenbelt Society at Hunter College, New York City, and Howard Sprouse of the Remediators.
Here is is! Episode II Nature’s Touch: Climate Change is Here–Filmmaker Journalist, Robert Lundahl Interviews Dave Skinner and Natalie Monterrosa
Very happy to announce preliminary release of Nature’s Touch: Climate Change is Here RADIO Series Episode One.
Special thanks to the amazing Robin Carneen (Namapahh First Peoples Radio), and Swinomish/Coast Salish connector and Radio Host/Writer, Executive Producer, Howard Sprouse. Streaming and Recording Consultant, Howard Cohen. Africa Distributor and Producer, Kanema Mupila Kameya (Zambia). Qacung Yufrican Yup’ik collaborator, Recording Artist and cultural liaison (and Episode 3 Guest), Alaska. Guests Enrique Lanz Oca, PhD., Natalie Monterrosa, Dave Skinner, Mike Macy. M.J. Jackson and Robin Carneen, Greenbelt Society (https://greenbeltsociety.wordpress.com., City University of New York, Hunter College, and Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.
Produced and recorded by Filmmaker, Robert Lundahl/Agence RLA, LLC, San Francisco, USA In memorium Maureen Hope Wall, instigator, artist and farmer, aquaculture system designer. Release of the first “multi–episode package” for global radio distribution begins December 26th for the new year of hope and light, available for air, January 1, 2021. Contact Robert Lundahl robert@studio-rla.com Series Producer, for more information.
Greenbelt Society 